Resistance Journal Volume-2-Number-2-Inlaga PDF

Journal of Resistance Studies
CONTENTS
Sara C. Motta and Tiina Seppl; Editorial: Feminized Resistance 5
Kate Smith; Telling Stories of Resistance and Ruination: Women
Seeking Asylum 33
Liz Mason-Deese; Unemployed Workers Movements and the
Territory of Social Reproduction 65
Sara C. Motta; Decolonizing Australias Body Politics: Contesting
the Coloniality of Violence of Child Removal 100
Aja Marneweck; Sexual and Spiritual R-Evolution through
Animism: The Feminine Semiotics of Puppetry 134
Padini Nirmal; Queering Resistance, Queering Research:
In Search of a Queer Decolonial Feminist Understanding
of Adivasi Indigeneity 167
Classical Book Review:
Tiina Seppl; Something about Love 205
Book Reviews:
Annette Maguire; Precarity as Radical Possibility 211
Markus Bayer; This is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is
Shaping the Twenty-First Century 218
Books Recieved 222
Cover illustration: Nandipha Mntambo Europa (2008)

Archival ink on cotton rag paper. Photo: Tony Meintjes
Image size 100 x 100cm Paper size 112 x 112cm
Nandipha Mntambo courtesy of Stevenson Cape Town and
Johannesburg
Guest Editors this issue: Sara C. Motta and Tiina Seppl
Editor: Stellan Vinthagen Deputy Editor: Jrgen Johansen
Assistant Editor: Sarah Freeman-Woolpert
Regional Editor for Latin America: John Holloway
Editorial Board (more information about the Board-members at
www.resistance-journal.org):
Almeida, Deirdre A. Martin, Brian

Alvarez, Sonia Maye-Banbury, Angela
Amster, Randall Ndura, Elavie
Bayat, Azef Nepstad, Sharon Erickson
Baaz, Mikael Randle, Michael
de la Cadena, Marisol Rank, Carol
Carter, April Richmond, Oliver
Chabot, Sean Rigby, Andrew
Cherry, Janet Schock, Kurt
Darweish, Marwan Schulz, Michael
Dudouet, Vronique Scott, James
Duncombe, Stephen Schweitzer, Christine
Goodwin, Jeff Sombutpoonsiri, Janjira
Jackson, Richard Srensen, Jens Stillhof
Kullenberg, Christopher Srensen, Majken Jul
Lilja, Mona Trnberg, Anton
MacLeod, Jason Weber, Thomas
A huge thanks to all the anonymous reviewers.

All contacts regarding the Journal: jorgen@resistance-journal.org
Published by Irene Publishing with support from Resistance Studies
Initiative at UMassAmherst
Submissions
Authors should send all submissions and resubmissions to JRS to
jorgen@resistance-journal.org.
Details regarding submission you will find here:
www.resistance-journal.org/submit/
Some articles are dealt with by the editors immediately, but most are read
by outside referees. For submissions that are sent to referees, we try to
complete the evaluation process within three months.
As a general rule, JRS operates a double-blind peer review process in
which the reviewers name is withheld from the author and the authors
name is withheld from the reviewer. Reviewers may at their own discre-
tion opt to reveal their name to the author in their review, but our stan-
dard policy is for both identities to remain concealed.
Within reasonable limits we will referee articles which do not strictly
conform to JRS style requirements. Absolute technical requirements in
the first round are: ample line spacing throughout (1.5 or double), an
abstract, adequate documentation using the author-date citation system
and an alphabetical reference list, and a word count on the front page
(include all elements in the word count).
Regular articles are restricted to a maximum of 12 000 words, includ-
ing all elements (title page, abstract, notes, references, tables, biographical
statement, etc.). We also ask authors to deliver a short and more popular
written version of their articles for a wider audience.
Book reviews are up to 3 000 words, normally shorter.
Short reviews of books, movies, web-sites etc are up to 400 words.
Comments column with research-based policy articles and comments
to articles published in earlier issues of JRS. These are up to 5 000 words.
Debate - Reflections are texts that enlight the reader about a specific
topic.
Books to be reviewed shall be sent to:JRS, J. Johansen, Sparsns 1010,
66891 Ed, Sweden
4
SARA C. MOTTA AND TIINA SEPPL FEMINIZED RESISTANCES
Editorial:
Feminized Resistances1
Sara C. Motta and Tiina Seppl
University of Newcastle University of Lapland
Australia Finland
Introduction
Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women
to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from
their bodies for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal
goal. Woman must put herself into the text as into the world and into
history by her movement (Cixous, 1976: 875).
Hlne Cixous emblematic call to write ourselves into the world and
political being, is a call which wraps itself softly around our fingers and
resolutely holds our hearts as we write this introduction. It is a call that
speaks to the experiences of trauma, silencing, and exile of our own,
and of which our authors speak. Yet, our special issue renders visible
how new political languages, logics, and literacies are emerging from
those places and subjects who have been rendered mute, monstrous,
and malignant by patriarchal capitalist-coloniality. We invite you to take
our hands and cast off the masks that have inhibited sight, feeling, and
knowing-being. We invite you to journey with us into this borderlands
1
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the authors of this special
issue, the anonymous referee reviewers, as well as the permanent editors, Stellan
Vinthagen and Jrgen Johansen for their wonderful support and continuous en-
couragement throughout the editing process. We are grateful to Sarah Freeman-
Woolpert for her skillful and professional language editing. Our heartfelt thanks
go to Nandipha Mntambo for the amazing cover image of this special issue. We
would like to thank Leonie Ansems de Vries for suggesting the Journal of Resis-
tance Studies as a potential forum for advancing theoretical debate on feminized
resistances. We would also like to thank Kathy Mee, Phoebe Everingham, and
William Kilner for their sensitive and insightful reading of this introduction.
5
Journal of Resistance Studies Number 2 - Volume 2 - 2016
encounter, where a politics enfleshed that is be-ing gently and powerfully

crafted in the worlds and words of feminized resistances can be found.
We hope that our collection of embodied texts will embolden (y)our lov-
ing weaving of this feminized politics otherwise.
What is to be done?
As the fissures in the violent logics of contemporary patriarchal capital-
ist-coloniality become ever more visible and visceral, those of us com-
mitted to co-constructing an other politics beyond these deathly logics of
being and knowing, are faced with the urgent and ever present question:
What is to be done?. In this special issue of the Journal of Resistance
Studies we seek to provide a tentative and tender mapping of feminized
resistances and subjectivities to support our navigation of these uncer-
tain and transitional times. We believe that engagement with such re-
sistances visibilizes practices of thought and action through and with
which to nurture the conditions of possibility for emergent and immi-
nent forms of creating, living, and loving otherwise.
Dominant representations of politics and resistance tend to repro-
duce the racialized and feminized subaltern subject as the absent other,
of populist unreason, conservative particularity, victims without voice,
and/or at best subjects of a concrete, identity-based politics that are un-
able to challenge macro-levels of power. Our issue speaks back to such
violent misrepresentations and elisions by centering the praxis and voices
of these subjects of, and from, the margins. We demonstrate how racial-
ized subaltern women and communities are in fact at the forefront of the
creation of a multiplicity of female political subjectivities and a marked
feminization of resistance (Mohanty, 2003; Motta, 2013).
Womens political engagement in contemporary struggles and
movements is varied and complex. Some fight against neoliberal devel-
opment projects that displace thousands of poor people. Whilst oth-
ers contest historic logics of coloniality that imbricate smoothly with
contemporary neoliberal logics to reproduce the pathologization of
raced and feminized communities that results in, among other things,
increasing rates of incarceration and forced child removal. Some con-
centrate particularly on queering politics in their struggle against patri-
archal capitalist-coloniality, sexism, and heteronormativity. Additionally,
6
womens role in many popular movements has intensified, with shifts in

the political towards a micro-political subversion and creation of, and in,
the everyday. These women in movement enact and embody a commun-
ing which nurtures horizontal forms of political power and disalienated
subjectivities, as well as collective and collaborative forms of social re-
production.
Such feminized subjectivities, politics, and resistance, if recognized
at all, are generally conceptualized from perspectives that draw strongly
on masculinist and Euro-centric concepts, approaches, and practices of
knowing (Spivak, 1988; Lugones, 2010; Motta, 2013, 2016). What is elid-
ed and denied in many analyses is the ways in which racialized subaltern
women who simultaneously face multiple oppressions can also create
and experiment with new political subjectivities, re-imagine emancipa-
tory politics, and produce and embody multiple grounds of epistemo-
logical difference and becoming. Viewed from this perspective, the emer-
gence of female political subjectivities and the feminization of resistance
raise fundamental epistemological and political questions. There is thus
an urgent need to recognize a feminization of resistance that is his-
torically distinctive, and which has the potential to challenge White and
masculinist conceptualizations of political and social transformation
(Motta, 2013: 35).
It is our explicit aim to address and explore these themes from a va-
riety of epistemological perspectives in order to enflesh and decolonize
representation, and to contribute to a queering of the very boundaries
which have shaped disciplinarity in White masculinist alienating forms
of knowing-being which work to produce the feminized and racialized
subaltern subject as absent of rationality and subjectivity.
In our call for papers we invited texts with critical reflections, evalu-
ations, theoretical developments, and empirical analyses, encouraging a
critical discussion on the forms, conditions, possibilities, as well as prob-
lematics of feminized resistances and political subjectivities. We articu-
lated our interest especially in critical understandings of feminized resis-
tance strategies, subjectivities, epistemologies, discourses, tactics, effects,
causes, contexts, and experiences. In line with the journals main aim, we
set out to advance an understanding of how feminized resistances and
emancipatory practices might subvert and dislocate repression, injustice
7
and domination of any kind, as well as how such resistance might nur-
ture autonomous subjectivity, alternative communities, as well as opposi-
tional ways of thinking, being, doing, and loving.
Our call for papers received 35 abstracts. We selected the eight
most promising papers for potential inclusion in this special issue, which
ultimately contains five articles. In our editorial we work pedagogically
to map, systematize, and strategize with their theoretical, methodologi-
cal, and empirical contributions. Our systematization does not seek to
re-enclose the epistemological diversity of enfleshed political knowing-
being that our contributors demonstrate into a Monological and closed
tome of reified political directives or theoretical Truths. Rather, we hope
to maintain a tension between the act of representing these feminized
resistances and the art of keeping open the possibilities they gift to us in
our thinking and being political otherwise.
We start by addressing the articles main contributions to the field
of resistance studies as we see it, and then move on to four key innovative
themes in feminized resistances that emerge from the pieces: storytell-
ing as onto-epistemological becomings; reading motherhood politically;
feminine semiotics and the feminine divine; and liminality and queering
borderlands. We then move to strategies and thinking-being ways for-
ward that emerge from our collective voice: storytelling, storytellers and
critical intimacy; onto-epistemological listening; and an ethics of care
and care-fullness. We consider as part of this discussion the role and
positionality of the researcher together with important methodological
and ethical issues in engaging in feminized resistance in feminized ways.
Feminizing Resistance Studies

In her article Telling Stories of Resistance and Ruination: Women Seek-
ing Asylum, Kate Smith examines the relationship between hegemonic
narratives about people seeking asylum and women asylum seekers own
stories in Britain. She argues for new and different narratives which
accommodate some of the complexities and contradictions of womens
lives and open up the possibilities for women to tell their own diverse
and different stories. Her analysis demonstrates that while some women
who are seeking asylum make sense of their lives and tell their stories in
8
relation to dominant narratives, not all stories fit into these frameworks,
and are thus at risk of being overlooked, silenced, and unrecognized.
Yet, when these women gain the possibility to produce their own stories,
they can challenge problematic identities and dehumanizing narratives
while creating new and different narratives through which it becomes
possible to accommodate some of the complexities and contradic-
tions they are experiencing in their lives.
Smiths analysis feminizes resistance studies by emphasizing the
importance of narrative forms of resistance which not only produce
new representations of otherwise invisibilized and infantilized raced
and feminized subaltern subjects, but which also breathe into being the
possibilities of survival, resilience, and enfleshed hope. Importantly, her
analysis disrupts the binary often found in resistance studies which either
focuses on the political event as the epitome of resistance, or an unprob-
lematized everyday form of resistance. Whilst Smith focuses our atten-
tion on everyday micro-practices of resistance and active agency, she
demonstrates how these possibilities are constructed through practices
of meaning-making in which contradictory fragments of good sense are
put to work in the slow and careful practice of telling our stories.
Liz Mason-Deeses article Unemployed Workers Movements and
the Territory of Social Reproduction analyzes the role of women in
the unemployed workers movements in Buenos Aires, Argentina, fo-
cusing on the ways on which they have politicized the issue of social
reproduction by organizing around issues such as hunger, healthcare,
housing, and education, as well as creating alternative economic prac-
tices and other autonomous forms of social reproduction. Her analysis
shows how womens key role in organizing around reproduction implies
a different sense of the political, which decenters the spaces and institu-
tions of the state in order to privilege territorial organizing in the spaces
of everyday life. In addressing the politicization of social reproduction,
Mason-Deeses article contributes to the debate on feminized resistances
in a way which goes beyond a quantitative increase in womens partici-
pation and leadership in social movements or the increasing visibility of
womens issues to imply a qualitative difference in how resistance takes
shape. The feminization of resistance, as she points out, entails chal-
lenging the traditional divisions between the public and private spheres,
9
politicizing the personal, and shifting emphasis onto bodies and the ev-
eryday activities of social reproduction be it in the context of families,
trade unions, political parties, state institutions, or within social move-
ments where certain forms of care work are undervalued and assumed
to be womens responsibility, while men engage in what is typically con-
sidered political work: decision-making, public actions, speaking.
Mason-Deeses contribution arguably feminizes resistance studies
by demonstrating how spaces that have been traditionally considered pri-
vate or womens space are actually key sites of political struggle and co-
creation. This allows, as she argues, for rethinking not only what counts
as labor but what labor is valuable and necessary work. It is exactly in
this way that women continue to lead the resistance to processes of neo-
liberalism and the precaritization wrought by this crisis of reproduction,
through the creation of autonomous forms of social reproduction and
the promotion of an ethics of care that challenges the basic assumptions
of capitalist development. Her contribution suggests the development
of analytic lenses that creates potential for subverting masculinist forms
of resistance which devalues and invisibilizes the politics of social repro-
duction and the everyday. It also suggests developing methodologies of
critical intimacy with women and communities in struggle as opposed to
traditional methodologies which have a strong tendency to value criti-
cal distance and reinscribe divisions of labor between thinker and doer,
masculinized white mind and feminized, racialized body (Motta, 2011;
Lugones, 2010).
In her article Decolonizing Australias Body Politics: Contesting
the Coloniality of Violence of Child Removal, Sara C. Motta develops
a critique of the continual historic and contemporary use of child re-
moval to systematically pathologize and criminalize Black, Indigenous,
and poor-white motherhood. Through her decolonizing feminist re-
reading of contemporary child removal in Australia, she demonstrates
how the technologies and rationalities put to work as part of the re-
production of the modern state, wound the body politic in ways that
disarticulate the conditions of possibility of the political subjectivity of
the subaltern. Moreover, Motta illustrates active processes of subjec-
tivity of racialized subaltern mothers and families, and their allies offer
emergent possibilities for a decolonizing politics which seeks not rec-
10
ognition within the state of things as they are but a radical disruption
of the terms of the conversation as they have and continue to structure
Australias state and polity.
From the perspective of resistance studies, the main contribution
of Mottas article is the way in which her praxical analysis and reflec-
tion extends our understanding of the feminization of resistance by
bringing to the centre of our analytic and political attention the decolo-
nizing epistemological and methodological aspects of this reinvention
of emancipatory politics. Importantly, this means beginning from the
onto-epistemological politics of subaltern racialized women through
embracing the conflicting, tension-ridden experiences of being at once
subjugated as a racialized subaltern non-subject and resisting this through
active processes of subjectivity. In this way, it goes beyond both the
representational invisibility of the racialized women and also the racial-
ized subaltern woman as victim detailed above, to a perspective of femi-
nism in decolonizing praxis. As this is necessarily a praxical task, it
implies a stepping inwards to the contours of everyday life and the em-
bodied experience of the lived contradictions between the fiction and
realities of capitalist (self) representation. Similarly to Smith and Mason-
Deese, this suggests a methodological reorientation to an epistemologi-
cal co-creation of meaning for transformation, and subverts patriarchal
capitalist-colonial forms of theory-making and practices of critique. Not
only does this challenge the epistemic privilege of the thinker-knower
but it also argues for practices of unlearning and decolonizing of that
very subjectivity (to be enfleshed later).
Aja Marnewecks article Sexual and Spiritual R-Evolution through
Animism: The Feminine Semiotics of Puppetry explores resistant rep-
resentational strategies of the feminine through analysis of animism-
based creative practices in South Africa. She focuses on puppetry, which
she considers a sentient tool that simultaneously exposes the constructs
of being whilst engaging in what could be described as a performative
alchemy of imagination and form. In analyzing how womens puppetry
pushes the margins of complex political and sexual discourse as the
language of the feminine body expressed in her multiplicitous identities
and sexualities of resistance, Marneweck illustrates how these artistic
and creative practices based on animism proffer strategies for expansive
11
creative distillations that provide new trajectories for feminine resistance

and empowerment. According to her, puppetry can serve as a femi-
nizing, de-colonizing form of artistic resistance and evoke critical and
contentious languages of a co-constructive femininity in strategies of
resistance today.
From the perspective of resistance studies, the way in which she in-
terprets feminine puppetry as an artistic strategy of spiritual and sexual
resistance to western patriarchal oppression is intriguing. With a refer-
ence to a feminized strategy for r-evolutionary creative practices, she
argues that it is the radical feminine at the heart of puppetry that offers
so many of the discursive strategies for resistance that emerge in its con-
temporary performance applications. Her contribution enacts a return
to the embodied, similar to the other contributions; however, this return
to the embodied enacts in form and content a return of the world to the
word, of the body to the text, and of the heart/womb to thought. This,
in effect, helps in building an infrastructure of feminized resistances and
becomings which present an intimate and essential challenge to tradi-
tions of critique and resistance studies embedded in logics of patriarchal
capitalist-coloniality.
The last article of our special issue, Queering Resistance, Queer-
ing Research: In Search of a Queer Decolonial Feminist Understanding
of Adivasi Indigeneity takes us to Kerala, India, the context in which
Padini Nirmal mobilizes a queer decolonial feminist framework and uti-
lizes queering to critically examine and analyze contemporary indigeneity
as well as indigenous resistance. She does this by analyzing, firstly, the
coloniality of development and its material effects on Adivasi lands and
consequent land struggles, and secondly, by analyzing gender and sexu-
ality in the same context. Nirmal illustrates how queering discloses the
latent structural complexities of Adivasi indigeneity by drawing causal
links between systematic processes of land loss and land alienation, ma-
terial livelihood, and structural changes in various domains, including
gender, sexuality, spirituality and health. Critically analyzing the states
various policies through a decolonial feminist perspective, she shows
how the objectives of different state policies are often contradictory
with each other and can be harmful from the perspective of the Adiva-
sis, for example, as development policies create a state of dependence
12
rather than empowerment and conservation policies support indus-

trial growth rather than socio-ecological preservation.
Nirmals article addresses resistance from a variety of perspectives
and on multiple levels. One of her most interesting arguments is that
emergent and existing modalities of Adivasi resistance can be con-
sidered epistemological and ontological acts of decolonial resistance
against the combined coloniality of capitalism, development and mo-
dernity on their ancestral lands. She illustrates how queering can be used
productively in helping to recognize indigenous agency and resistance
while also developing our understanding of research as resistance, a
queer process that destabilizes, rethinks, and questions normative opera-
tions of power. It also advances the general understanding of resistance
in various ways, for example, by showing that
the active, continuing presence of the Adivasi within the modern na-
tion state to be an act of decolonial resistance Even when Adivasis
do not engage in protests and movement actions, they continue to live
in living worlds of their own ontological, epistemological, and mate-
rial making. This continued presence and prevalence of Adivasi land
ontologies, and the living worlds that their ontologies enact and sustain
despite years of colonial intervention, indicates presence to be a mo-
dality of resistance in general, and a form of embodied resistance in
particular.
As Nirmal points outs, these kinds of interpretations can poten-
tially broaden our understanding of resistance as conjoined component
of decoloniality where that which is decolonial, is already in resistance.
Queering, in other words, works to complicate the concept of resistance
by connecting it to acts of refusal, denial, and non-engagement, and by
defining ontological difference as a form of decolonial engagement and
act of resistance. In this way, her work centers the onto-epistemological
multiple practices of being and relating that disrupt and escape attempts
to analyze and engage with subaltern resistances using Monological on-
to-epistemological frameworks embedded in patriarchal coloniality.
13
The Gifts of Feminized Resistances

Below we map and systematize four gifts emerging from our palimpsest
of feminized resistances gifts that dominant framings of resistance and
politics have written over. These gifts move us into uncharted territory
of unknown possibilities. Yet, we feel they offer alchemical insights into
how we might come to collectively develop multiple, heartfelt, and hope-
filled answers to the question, What is to be done?.
Storytelling as Onto-Epistemological Becomings

What might be considered an epistemology of becoming underpinning
the contributions to the special issue, centers its modes of be-ing around
storytelling. Here, female subjects develop practices that seek to uproot
the dominant and violent narratives that are told about them and which
often embed themselves in their stories of self. Stories are, thus, not
simply told about us but rather, as Kate Smith in her article explains,
our lives are produced through, and at times constrained by, our own
stories and the storytelling of others. For women seeking asylum are
responsibilized, as Smith continues, to tell their stories in relation to
dominant narratives. Such demands to speak through and with domi-
nant narratives also manifests in the helping professions for whom,
as Smith continues, those women asylum seekers who do not reproduce
a victim story become often unrecognized and are thus silenced, pre-
cluding recognition and engagement with their stories of agency and
resistance.
These dominant stories often tear us and our families into pieces,
as Sara C. Motta demonstrates in the case of forced child removal in
Australia. Such stories, in this case, reproduce historic violent practices
of state intervention onto the body of the racialized and feminized in the
name of civilization and saving. In the contemporary period, they
are put to work to produce raced and feminized subjects as hate fig-
ures. They aim to divide the popular body politic against itself and make
women dance to a tune that is not theirs, distorting their realities and
possibilities in an attempt at suffocation under layers of disembodied
concepts, materialized through the everyday violent tentacles of state-
capitalist power.
14
In contrast, as our contributors demonstrate, the storytelling of

feminized resistances constitutes a re-telling that re-worlds and re-roots
otherwise negated feminized and racialized subjects. It enfleshes an ex-
istential coming into (collective) being which reclaims and re-members
the arts of speaking-listening. Through this, seeds of possibility of our
becoming are planted as we weave the actualities of be-ing otherwise in
the world. This weaving, as Aja Marneweck demonstrates, connects, and
is of, the sacred and the profane, of the everyday sweat and blood and
breath, with the cosmic utterings of a feminine semiotic. This epistemo-
logical practice of relationality and connection develops a voice that em-
bodies fragility as its strength and cannot be contained by the literacy of
the phenomenology of Patriarchal Whiteness and the logics and ratio-
nalities of Coloniality. Rather, it is here that our serpents tongues begin
to speak through whispers of worlds and desires that beautify the grey-
ness of disconnection and despair. It is here that a prefigurative transfor-
mation is actualized in which the pain body of internalized shame and
disbelief becomes an embodied speaking back, at times beyond patriar-
chal capitalist-coloniality.
The voices and the stories told are of a subject that is multiple. This
subject moves against and beyond the prophetic from on high, thus
speaks the Truth form of storytelling so dominant in masculinist forms
of emancipatory left critique (for further reflection see West, 1989; Mot-
ta, 2016). Such masculinist traditions of critique are characterized by an
affectivity of ruptures, roughness, and a fierceness which re-articulates a
terrain of the Monological, speaking over our embodied witnessing, and
negating our grief and joy as sites of philosophical possibility. Feminized
critique, as our contributors demonstrate, instead honors, and speaks
from, the embodied experiences of subjugation and resistances, weaving
as Lugones describes an encarnated peopled memory.
These practices push beyond the restrictive confines of critique
which reify forms of resistance valuable and visible to an external audi-
ence and instead, as Smith discusses, acknowledge personal or intimate
activities, as well as practices and behaviors of resistance in response
to a subtle and complex set of different circumstances and situations.
These other histories form the ground for a re-rooting of subjects
negated by the dominant script of the political. Such re-rooting subverts
15
the paradoxical gaze that marks us as invisible as subjects and yet hyper-
visible as objects of intervention, through the co-creation of a visibility
of our own. This feeling-speaking visibility does not seek to speak in
the masters language, but rather orientates itself towards a re-creation
of the very terms, logics, and rationalities of the political, including the
revolutionary/radical political.
Reading Motherhood Politically

Our contributors demonstrate how the raced body of the subaltern
mother becomes a legitimate site of state interventions which attempt
to reproduce the non-subjectivity of these women and their families.
As Motta demonstrates, neoliberal logics and rationalities of individu-
alization of social ills and raced pathologization of the poor imbricate
smoothly with the historic violent rationalities and logics of coloniality.
Here Black and Indigenous mothers, and increasingly poor white moth-
ers, become positioned as outside and against citizenship, a threat to
civility and their children, and thus subject to forced child removal or in
the case of women seeking asylum, as Smith demonstrates, represented
as bad mothers and/or bogus asylum seekers. Black and Indigenous
motherhood becomes positioned as a stain on the body politic, in need
of cleansing and removal. Additionally, as Mason-Deese demonstrates
in the case of Argentina, this combined with increasing labor precarity
and removal of public services often place mothers in the paradoxical
position of both being blamed for their poverty and shouldered with the
burden of their families survival. The combination of these disciplinary
interventions, social abandonment, and (mis)representations reproduce
historic wounding and inflict new layers of wounding across and upon
the body politic in an attempt to disarticulate the conditions of political
voice and subjectivity of the subaltern.
However, as the terrain of the political economy of neoliberal vio-
lence shifts increasingly to the community, and mothers are often at the
heart of their community, they have moved from the margins to the
centre of the re-creation of a new politics of the commons and social
reproduction. As Liz Mason-Deese quotes,
16
The men were embarrassed, they didnt want anyone to know they were
not working, so they would stay inside all day, many started drinking
Meanwhile, us women had to go on providing for our families, we had
to eat, we didnt have time to go about being embarrassed or worrying
about our pride thats why we came together and started organizing.
(Interview, November 11, 2011, La Matanza)
From a place of devaluation, individualization, and often despair,
mothers become the key organizers, thinkers, and collective nurturers of
their communities. Positioned as a stain on civility and empty of thought,
history and subjectivity, they collectively subvert this and come into be-
ing as political subjects with voice, agency, and dignity. Through their
practices they create social relationships that do not produce for capi-
tal but for the commons and an other politics of well-being. Collective
motherhood and forms of mothering such as these enact a politics in,
again, and beyond the traditional figure of the mother. Such subversion
and recuperation of an otherwise disparaged and negated motherhood,
is also enacted in the narratives of mothers seeking asylum in which they
foreground their continued care and loving-being as a mother even after
being forced to separate from their children. Similarly, mothers who have
faced, and are facing child removal, as Motta demonstrates, seek to re-
cuperate and subvert dominant (mis)representations, often internalized,
that they are unfit mothers and unable to care by practices of testimony
and re-telling in which they identify, and strengthen, their capacity to
care, survive, and nurture.
Such processes by necessity open our politics to horizons of other
ethics and practices of care, not limited or framed by the privatized het-
eronormative and colonial rendition of family to the nuclear family unit.
Indeed, they expand motherhood to the non-maternal body, and bring
value to practices and relationships normally relegated to womens work
and yet essential to ensure the reproduction and well-being of our com-
munities. As Mason-Deese describes in relation to unemployed move-
ments in Argentina, this includes
taking care of a children a collective, community responsibility, not the

sole responsibility of mothers or other female relatives, and enables
17
women to be more equal participants in the movement as a whole. On

the other hand, by paying members to work in childcare and education-
al projects, either directly or through government subsidies, the MTD
demonstrates the importance it places on these activities. Valuing and
compensating this labor thus directly contrasts against its invisibiliza-
tion and naturalization as womens labor under capitalism, and allows
for the work to be shared rather than falling solely to women.
This politics of motherhood also nurtures what is arguably the
terrain of a new cosmopolitics, a new enfleshed political communion
embedded within care; care for self, other, and cosmos. This takes seri-
ously an affectivity of tenderness, attentiveness, connection, and love,
and moves beyond and below a disembodied politics of momentary
ruptures, cataclysmic events, and great egos. As Mason-Deese describes,
Speaking of care implies a way of engaging differently in reproduction
by prioritizing the creation and reproduction of life and healthy social
relations over the reproduction of capital. Feminized resistances are,
clearly, at the very heart of this politics of care and social reproduction
otherwise.
The politics of motherhood thus foregrounds and centralizes the
site of the community and practices of social reproduction in this new
feminized politics of the commons. Here a politics in, against, and beyond
the figure of the hegemonic mother is articulated, one which vindicates
the capacity and the dignity of Black and Indigenous motherhood and
traditions of mothering, at the same time as it collectivizes mothering to
the non-maternal body. By valuing labor that is traditionally individual-
ized, feminized, and invisibilized, it re-thinks and re-shapes the contents,
forms, rhythms, and textures of emancipatory politics and resistance. It
shifts our attention and bodies to the intimacies of reproducing everyday
life against and beyond the politics of capitalist negation and dehuman-
ization and masculinist and White forms of the (revolutionary) political.
Feminine Semiotics and Feminine Divine

Now I-woman am going to blow up the Law: an exposing henceforth
possible and ineluctable: let it be done, right now (Cisoux, 1976: 887).
18
As Walter Mignolo explains, in capitalist coloniality the word is

separated from the world and becomes a disembodied source of Truth
and Reason in the world premised upon the epistemological annihilation
of the raced other. However, this raced other is also deeply gendered, as
a feminized dark body of lack, barbarity, death, and madness that must
be tamed and contained. Such epistemological logics and rationalities
create a Monological language and onto-epistemological text of a sin-
gular world:
given over to ritual, repetition, a secondary attribution of values, specu-

lation and to a logic unsuited to life and its breath uprooted from
its engendering in the present, from its connection to my own and the
others body (Irigaray, 2016: 123).
A return to the enfleshed feminine as the basis of a feminine se-
miotic that speaks from this space of abjection and negation, not as an
Other to the Self, but as an other outside and autonomous, becomes thus
a mode of creative becoming in the practices of feminized resistances.
Feminized forms of representation are a central thread in such enfleshed
coming into being of our-selves otherwise. These necessarily exceed the
logics and rationalities of representation of patriarchal capitalist-coloni-
ality.
Here the contribution of Marneweck is paradigmatic of this un-
tameable feminine semiotic of being-knowing-feeling. In its form the
piece conjures into being the third space of the inappropriate other
(Trinh T. Minh-Hha, 1987), with the word as both representation and
expression weaving undulating, wild, untameable, and allegorical texts.
In its content, it engages with the feminine semiotic as represented and
called into be-ing through the embodied animistic performances of
feminist puppetry in South Africa. As she describes,
Through the body of the performed puppet, deliberate attention is

brought to the inherent multiplicity of being that facilitates life It is
these multiple performing differences that converge in the puppet that
render it an inappropriate other, as that which both expresses and con-
founds construct and being, visually and critically bridging inside and
outside, critique and aesthetic, binary and liminality. Puppetry reveals
19
itself as a sentient tool that simultaneously exposes the constructs of

being in the sculpted, created form (morph) and the performing femi-
nine body, whilst engaging in what I can only express as a performative
alchemy of presence and embodiment (forces, power, abjection, cre-
ation and decay, sentience, emotion).
Language becomes multiple, taking embodied, spiritual, ancestral,
cognitive, and aesthetic forms. Language also exceeds representation and
calls into being the presence of the third space of the inappropriate other
of which Marneweck speaks. In these performances of play, ritual, and
imagination, the sacredness of connection to the feminine body, the an-
cestral knowledges of women and of the body of the earth and cosmos
are re-called and re-membered to be present. The creative re-connection
to what black feminist Audre Lorde (2000) spoke of as the erotic, is nur-
tured, and in this the sacred multiple sexed and embodied liminal sexual-
ity at the heart of the feminine semiotic speaks. As Marneweck explains,
this enfleshed feminization of re-evolutionary resistance holds open
the doors of not just an alternative resistance to the destructive segrega-
tions of hegemonic discourse and systems, but of living awareness of
the fluidity of boundaries so crucial to revisioning identity, sexuality, self,
environment and being in the 21st century.
Such onto-epistemological politics of the embodied decolonizing
other are also touched upon in Nirmals contribution, which seeks to
develop a queer decolonial feminist reading of Adivasi Indigeneity in
Attappady, Kerala. In this decolonial politics of presence, the land is
subject and indigeneity is always-already in relation to the land which
has spiritual, material, and ultimately ontological value. Monological and
reductionist linguistic representations reproduced by the state of/as co-
loniality thus enact continuing symbolic and material violence upon Adi-
vasi peoples. For instance, state renditions of land as empty and/or ob-
ject to be commercialized render silent Adivasi complex representations
in which, as Nirmal describes citing one of her interviewees, kaaTu
refers to land for agriculture, while maNu refers to all land, territory
and living world, veeTu refers to home, and solai refers to the for-
est. If land has presence, history, and knowledge, then its rendition as
absence reproduces violent logics of silence and silencing.
20
Land as already always ontological-political has clear resonances

and connections with what other activist decolonial scholars such as au-
thor Marisol de la Cadena (2010), speaking in relation to Indigenous poli-
tics in the Andes, calls a new cosmopolitics which embraces earth-beings
as subjects. Queering, as Nirmal describes, is not just about decolonizing
relations to land, but also about the decolonization of everything in re-
lation. This ontological politics or cosmopolitics ruptures the historic
hierarchical and violently enforced borders of masculinized White man
against and over feminized and racialized nature, that is, the natural upon
which the coloniality of liberalism is embedded. Queering feminist de-
coloniality thus helps to visibilize and resist the Monological and singular
politics of knowledge of patriarchal capitalist-coloniality which renders
land as object, empty of being-knowing relationality, and thus void of
onto-epistemological value.
Resistance and calling into be-ing an other way of life as an ulti-
mately Queering Feminine Semiotic seeks not to speak in the terms of
White masculinist logics, rationalities, and performances of resistance
and critique. For these, as Cisoux describes [create] the false woman
who is preventing the live one from breathing. Rather, the queering
feminine semiotic as the feminization of resistance seeks to inscribe
the breath of the whole wo-man. A complex multilayered, embedded,
and embodied co-creative be-ing in the world which embraces all that is
exiled, denied, and rendered mute and pathological within masculinist
forms of the political become the grounds for our speaking. Such speak-
ing is multiple, excessive, unruly, heretic, and it re-works in multiple and
open ways the epistemological grounds of be-ing and becoming in/as/
with the world.
Liminality and Queering Borderlands

Motta, Nirmal, and Marneweck all resist and subvert in form and con-
tent hierarchical binaries and bordering practices constitutive of patriar-
chal capitalist-coloniality. In different ways, they speak a politics from the
abject or the marginalized others that finds in these places and bodies the
possibilities for a queering feminist decolonial politics otherwise. This
subverts the re-presentations of the margins and the marginal as episte-
mologically monstrous and devoid of any capacity as speaking-subject.
21
It instead seeks to co-create collective practices of meaning-making in

which we imminently call into being other worlds and epistemological
grounds of becoming.
The first steps in this as practice and representation are, as Nirmal
describes, taking the inversion of the margin and the center and ex-
posing the violence that brought into being and undergirds the reproduc-
tion of this hierarchical binary/border. Like this, we become willing and
able to look Medusa straight on to see her and as Hlne Cisoux (1976:
884885) so beautifully describes, what we see is that shes not deadly.
Shes beautiful and shes laughing.
This epistemological privileging and political centering of the mar-
gins and otherwise disposable or infantilized subject disrupts and dis-
lodges the complex polities of invisibility and hyper-visibility, which all
our authors touch upon and which reproduce the onto-epistemological
negation of these feminized and racialized subaltern subjects. The immi-
nent co-construction of knowing embodied presence subverts the dehu-
manizing gaze of coloniality, shining a collective light on the continued
biopolitical violence of the rationalities and technologies of contempo-
rary neoliberalized coloniality.
The creation of our own visibility on our own terms not only in-
volves subverting the external gaze between the binary, but also casting a
tender look at the ways in which the colonizers gaze becomes internal-
ized and creates epistemological and ontological soul wounds (Gill et al.,
2012; Duran et al., 2008). As Motta and Smith demonstrate in relation
to mothers experiencing forced child removal in Australia and women
asylum seekers in Britain respectively, this involves complex and mul-
tiple forms of testimony and embodied witnessing, premised upon an
ethics of careful attentiveness, deep listening, and active unlearning. As
Jasmina Husanovi (2015: 26) writes in relation to the politics of trauma,
enacting a modality of witnessing is an embodied experience which
creates anew shattered webs and coordinates of humanity, sociality, and
politicality. It also crafts new feminized literacies of grief, joy, and em-
bodied hope.
Subverting the violence of the gaze of Power, Truth, and Reason
does more than speak from and centre the margins and marginality as
22
site of epistemic possibility. It seeks to disrupt the very binaries between

centre and margin, colonizer and colonized, masculine and feminine, self
and other. It thus enacts a decolonization in form and content of the
categories of subjectification in which we (dis)appear as racialized and
feminized (non)subjects. As Motta recounts in relation to the act of wit-
nessing the agentic narrative of a misnamed and shamed mother, a radi-
cal relationality can be forged which disrupts the boundary between, and
categories of, self and other. In this occurs a mutual learning and unlearn-
ing of the wounds of coloniality, and which, as Nirmal discusses in the
case of queering feminist decoloniality but equally applicable here, co-
creates a simultaneous construction of epistemological and ontological
narratives of the researcher and the research, whereby the researchers
own world-making merges with those of the research subjects. These
encounters enact alchemical processes of meaning-making in which lim-
inality and plurality of be-ing and becoming are foregrounded. Echoing
the sacred practices of the Feminine Semiotics in the animistic puppetry
of which Marneweck speaks, this praxis, as Nirmal continues, is not
about border crossing, but about shape shifting borders themselves.
Our collective contribution in this special issue on Feminized Resis-
tances subverts and challenges much current critical debate that fails to
recognize or condemns and is fearful of a politics which begins from the
placed-based experiences of multiple oppressions. Such critical debate
often suggests that such place-based and intimately embodied forms of
feminized and racialized politics can only ever do the work of capitalist
hegemony and recuperate potentially radical politics into a liberal and
individualistic moralism which disarticulates popular revolutionary sub-
jectivities and collectivities.
We speak back, in and through multiple tongues, to this (mis)rep-
resentation of the possibilities of politics which begin from such ex-
periences through the work of decolonial feminist autonomist praxis
emerging from racialized subaltern women across the globe. Centrally
this we does not seek in form or content to re-enclose political pos-
sibilities into a singular and Monological onto-epistemological project.
Rather, these praxical methodologies and relational onto-epistemic en-
counters enflesh the provincialization of the Euro-centric revolutionary
subject assumed in extant critique, and demonstrate how its grounds of
23
being are premised on the denial and dehumanization of the raced and
feminized other. In this way, we seek to open immanent and embodied
possibilities of a multiple liminal pluridiverse subjectivity that is birthing
into being both an other feminized politics of resistance and affirma-
tive decolonizing onto-epistemological grounds of becoming (political)
otherwise.
Strategies and Ways Forward: The Role and

Positionality of Researcher and Methodologies of
Feminist Decolonizing
This final part of our editorial moves to strategic considerations specifi-
cally in relation to fostering and nurturing the conditions of possibility
for the seeding of an enfleshed politics and epistemological becoming
otherwise. We move through and dialogue with the contributors insights,
practices, and commitments. We speak from a perspective of scholar-
activists living and breathing an activist life (Seppl, forthcoming) in
which we seek to co-construct the conditions of our self-liberation with
the communities in which we are embedded.
We center the importance of tender and complex forms of both
coming to voice amongst and within ourselves and our feminized and
racialized communities, as well as the importance of co-creating tender
and complex forms of solidarity between different groups of women
in engaging in a broader yet multiple project of constructing decolonial
forms of feminist solidarity (Mohanty, 2003; see also Seppl, 2016a,
2016b). This kind of feminist praxis is based on the idea that through
the creation of a plurality of forms of knowing and transnational as
well as local alliances and solidarities, it is possible to destabilize episte-
mological politics of patriarchal capitalist coloniality, to challenge the
dramatic effects of neoliberal capitalism on the lives of women (Motta,
2013: 38), and to co-create the conditions of possibility for a new pluri-
diverse emancipatory politics for our times.
Storytelling, Storytellers, and Critical Intimacies

All the authors in this special issue share an embodied and existential
embrace of, and commitment to, decolonial forms of feminist solidarity
24
and being-knowing, and discuss their ethical and political commitments

very openly in their work. They all, in their differing ways, either through
feminist narrative methodology (Smith), feminist ethnographic meth-
odology (Mason-Deese, Marneweck), queer decolonial feminist (QDF)
methodology (Nirmal), or decolonizing feminist Participatory Action
Research (PAR) (Motta), seek to co-create the conditions of possibil-
ity for the telling of other stories. Such stories enact enfleshed and
existential coming into being of racialized subaltern women and their
communities which subvert and dislodge hegemonic renditions of Rea-
son, the Law, and Truth which attempt to render them mute, absent, or
pathological.
For all our authors, such a methodological commitment involves, in
one way or another, a return to the body and the embodied, and a new
poetic of embodied knowing/ledge. Such a return cannot be enacted
through the lens of critical distance and abstraction as separation, which
is common to masculinist and Euro-centric theoretical traditions and
practices of knowing-being, as we have argued above and in previous
writings. Rather, as Mason-Deese argues, this means recognizing that
self-reflective knowledge production is a fundamental element of this
new form of politics. This underlines the need for actively embracing
the unlearning of academic privilege and transforming the divisions of
labor and alienating practices of knowing-about within which such privi-
leges of the geo-politics of coloniality are embedded.
For Nirmal, this means queering the very binaries and boundaries
between knower and known, mind and body, concrete and universal,
which are characteristic of 20th century forms of hegemonic and critical
theorizing of resistance and the political. Like this, binaries which pro-
duce a knowing-researcher positioned as the subject that can both visi-
bilize and theorize domination and guide liberation, are disrupted and
jettisoned. Instead, as Marneweck describes, it is the fostering of prac-
tices and performances of self and/as other in which we can co-create
diverse, yet overlapping strategies for meaning-making, new languages
of resistances, and tongues of social and political change. This requires,
as Motta continues, the researcher moving away from representing the
other and rather, moving towards collective problem-solving, healing,
and transformation.
25
Arguably, the researcher(s) become(s) a storyteller(s), but such a

storyteller that is neither unitary nor separate yet rather a committed co-
creator of other enfleshed stories in which we come into knowing-
being. This involves a step away from seeking to discover one Truth
and one emancipatory political rationality and subjectivity, and rather
emphasizes ontological and epistemological multiplicity and diversity
through practices which nurture critical intimacy. Such a praxis, as Motta
describes, necessitates An epistemological stepping inwards which in-
volves nurturing and experimenting with knowledge processes in which
we collectively bring to awareness how systems of oppression wound us
as communities and as individuals. Yet, as she continues:
it is of no surprise that decolonizing epistemological practices comes

from those who inhabit the epistemological margins of colonial differ-
ence. They emerge out of the struggle and practice against ontological
and epistemological denial as outsiders-within formal education and in
the multiple informal spaces of everyday life and community organiz-
ing against processes of subjectification of coloniality.
This does not, however, imply erasing the complex and non-unitary
power differences between researcher and her research subjects. On the
contrary, as Nirmal argues, it requires reflexivity and respect in all re-
search settings. To support this, she positions her own research within
a space of queerness, where the researcher, the researched and the research
itself are queered by difference in their marginalities, oppressions, and
liberations, and united by the common goal of decolonizing understand-
ings, experiences, and practices:
Within this space of queerness it becomes possible to question the ways in

which marginality comes to be constructed, and recognize the agency
of each entity in relation to the other. The space of queerness, in my analy-
sis, accommodates multiple marginal positions, serving as an inclusive,
shifting space of borderlands, and thus offers a more complex, less
rigid understanding As a relational, decolonial zone, it allows the
centering of previously marginal beings and ideas by recognizing both
26
the shifting nature of marginality whereby the marginal is often within,

and sometimes alongside the center, and the operation of marginality
as a modality of resistance.
Onto-Epistemological Listening
Decolonizing feminist and queering methodologies described above are
committed to dislodging patriarchal capitalist-coloniality premised as it
is on closure to listening to other epistemological grounds of becoming.
This requires enacting a practice and politics of listening. Such listening
is epistemologically pushing us towards our borders of self in an effort
to reach out beyond the categorizations used to name, shame, and tame
us.
Listening such as this is both a starting point and also a premise of
a political practice that seeks to prefigure resistance and decolonizing as
research. In Kate Smiths work this has, for example, included the use of
a reflexive and multi-layered interpretive approach called the Listening
Guide which provides a research process that can disrupt and challenge
dominant narratives told about womens lives, enabling a different sub-
jectivity to bear upon the old universality (Brown and Gilligan, 1992:
16 cited in Smith, this issue).
For Marneweck and Nirmal, such listening practices entail atten-
tiveness to the rhythms of the black female body and the sacred body
of the earth. Additionally, epistemological listening embraces and is in-
scribed in practices of ritual, living sculpture, presence, symbol, slip-
page and embodiment which, as Marneweck continues, are places in
which we can encounter expression that provides a feminized strategy
for r-evolutionary creative practices.
This listening not only calls for attentiveness to the other as external
subject and be-ing. It also necessitates the uncertain, often discomfort-
ing, and fragile practice of internal listening that enables a blurring of the
borders between self and other, and a return to all that we have exiled.
Such homecoming to a third space of the inappropriate other, as Motta
describes, nurtures the kinds of reciprocal relationality of co-healing and
transformation that can work to dislodge the traces of coloniality dwell-
ing within and between us.
27
Spaces and practices of epistemological listening involve creating

the conditions of possibility for a speaking from the silence silence that
has been enforced by the violent misrepresentations of Power; silence
that has become habit as a practice of survival; silence that is a mark of
our traumatized collective bodies, minds, and psyches. In doing so, we
can foreground the urgency of reading trauma politically and thus bring-
ing from the margins to the centre healing as emancipation.
An Ethics of Care and Care-fullness

Listening in this way is not possible for the White masculinist knower.
For such a knower is a careless subject, able to distance and distract away
and over the messiness of everyday encounters, needs, and suffering.
Such a praxis can but emerge through a collective politics of care and
caring, as Mason-Deese so wonderfully describes through the stories and
experiences of women in unemployed workers movements and com-
munities in Argentina. This, as Annette Maguire describes in her book
review of Isabell Loreys State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, en-
tails valuing the labor of caring and social reproduction that has been tra-
ditionally relegated to womens work, invisible, and/or devalued. Here,
we would argue that feminisms from the margins, particularly those that
have resisted commodification and institutionalization, are of particular
importance if we are to think in common and materialize affective soli-
darity by investing in hope and labour in the politics against the govern-
ing terror which increasingly deepens and cements the ultimate precarity
of womens bodies and labour, life and thought (Husanovi, 2015: 20).
An ethics of care and nurturing calls for taking seriously the con-
ditions which make collaborative feminist decolonizing and queering
knowing-praxis possible (and impossible). Without such attentiveness,
the collaborations that we co-create run the risk of re-producing the very
same exclusions, elisions, and silences which render us absent and iso-
lated. This means taking seriously and reading politically questions such
as food, childcare, housing, mental and physical health, and embedded
trauma. These labors of love or, acts and practices of love as described
in Tiina Seppls book review of bell hooks All about Love necessitate
the co-creation of new languages and literacies that begin from the body,
for the body is already-always inscribed in the speaking from the experi-
28
ence of being violently rendered abject and absent.

Such care-full labor is tender, slow, and often centers on what might
otherwise be considered the mundane and outside of, or a distraction
away from, the political. However, we believe that it is by weaving the
magic of the everyday into conditions of our speaking, that we might
foreground the possibilities of a politics with which we can nurture the
self-liberation of our communities, and the co-creation of an autono-
mous feminized politics of resistance otherwise.
New Beginnings
Birthing worlds
writing silence
breathing life into liminality,
excavating from the denied.

Tenderly holding
to find the will to write
something shared, already

carried in collective memory
enfleshed into be-ing,
wandering through shadows

surviving dark alleys
swimming in the deep.
I journey with you;

this eternal multiple journey
where I is multiple too.
29
Storytellers re-rooted into life

passionate listening
nurturing care-fully desire.
We look Medusa in the face

realizing her beauty,
realizing we are not mistakes.
Speaking whispers
delicate tongues
feminized politics otherwise.
In Newcastle, Australia and Rovaniemi, Finland

Sara and Tiina, 28th November 2016
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32
KATE SMITH TELLING STORIES OF RESISTANCE AND RUINATION:
Telling Stories of Resistance and Ruination:

Women Seeking Asylum1
Kate Smith
University of Huddersfield, UK
Abstract
This paper examines the relationships between narratives which have come to
dominate in the twenty-first century about people seeking asylum and womens
stories of resistance and ruination. Identifying two narratives the hate figure
and the female victim I develop understandings about some of the social,
legal and historical contexts in Britain in which these narratives have come to
dominate. Drawing on an Economic and Social Research Council funded project
with women seeking asylum to explore some of the ways narratives can generate
possibilities for some women, this paper also identifies how narratives can be deeply
problematic for those who struggle to tell a story. Taking a feminist perspective and
narrative approach, four analytical frameworks are used to make sense of how
and why women tell their stories, offering a critical theoretical engagement with the
concepts of resistance and ruination. The analysis opens up an important space
that highlights the importance of narrative forms of resistance and consequently
enriches our understanding of the diversity of forms of feminized resistance in
the context of the emerging field of resistance studies. In doing so, I also explore
how and why women might tell stories of ruination and some of the constraints
placed on their stories. I position resistance as necessary for research processes that
seek to disrupt and challenge the formation of dominant narratives. I argue for
new and different narratives which accommodate some of the complexities and
1
My appreciation to the women whose stories are represented in this paper.
The impact of their accounts have been central to my ongoing work alongside
women seeking asylum. Thanks and acknowledgement to the Economic and
Social Research Council for the financial support (ES/H011803/1) for the re-
search on which this paper draws. Warm thanks to the reviewers for their con-
structive feedback that helped improve the quality of the paper and the positive
feedback on the final draft. My gratitude to the editors for their respectful and
relational approach that is both radical and necessary.
33
contradictions of womens lives and open up the possibilities for women to tell their
own diverse and different stories.
Introduction
Drawing on my own Economic and Social Research Council funded re-
search, this paper examines the relationships between dominant narra-
tives about people seeking asylum and womens own stories of resistance
and ruination. Bringing together feminist perspectives and narrative ap-
proaches, I highlight some of the ways research can be employed to
understand the lives of women seeking asylum. The analysis opens up
a critical space that emphasizes the importance of narrative forms of
resistance and the diversity of forms of feminized resistance in the con-
text of the emerging field of resistance studies. Caring deeply about the
issue of migration, I came to this research consciously motivated by my
academic, political, personal and intellectual biography. A researcher and
practitioner with a long history of working with women and children
seeking asylum, my commitment to the defense of human rights and
civil liberties has included highlighting and opposing the grave inequali-
ties and injustices faced by people seeking asylum across the globe. Over
the decades I have increasingly come to recognize that many injustices
are sanctioned or carried out by different social actors within power-
ful structures (such as the state, public, and media) which increasingly
vilify and dehumanize people seeking asylum (Cohen, 2002; Tyler, 2006).
Dominant narratives told about people seeking asylum have come to
position them in particularly negative ways (Chakrabarti, 2015; Cohen,
2002; Kea and Roberts-Holmes, 2013) and I feel a sense of responsibil-
ity to explore, understand, disrupt and challenge dominant narratives.
This has fuelled my commitment to ensure my research endeavors are
progressive and try to generate different ways of making sense of stories.
As Plummer (2013: 209) states, we need always be mindful of the tales
we tell and the tales we hear: for stories have consequences. We should
always be careful of the tales we tell for stories and their documents are
our futures.
My own interest in asylum derives from and is grounded in the
capacity of women seeking asylum as agentic subjects, whose lives are
not simply represented in dominant narratives, but are also produced
by their own stories. As such, my epistemological approach rejects the
34
view that there is one truth or one story for researchers to discover,
but rather that all stories are liberated, informed and constrained by the
social, political and historical contexts of their telling (Plummer, 1995).
I suggest that the concept of one truth delimits the possibilities for
telling stories of asylum and leaves those whose lives do not fit neatly
into this narrative framework without a story to tell (Woodiwiss, 2014).
Taking a feminist perspective and narrative approach, this paper explores
how and why women seeking asylum come to narrate their lives. Whilst
there is a large body of literature concerned with either narrative or femi-
nist research, this paper contributes to that body of literature whilst also
seeking to expand the scarcity of literature that brings feminist perspec-
tives and narrative approaches together. In doing so, I attend to some
of the concerns of feminist narrative researchers in the context of the
emerging field of resistance studies.
Drawing on the work of Cindi Katz, I develop an analytical narra-
tive framework of nuanced resistances, in order to make sense of how
and why women might tell the stories they do. The transformative po-
tential of diverse resistances is one of the ways in which dominant nar-
ratives are negotiated, circumvented and resisted. Furthermore, drawing
on the work of Arthur Frank, I go on to explore how and why women
also tell stories of ruination which exposes the constraints placed on
womens stories. In order to create possibilities for womens lives and
to potentially improve the lives of women seeking asylum, this paper
attempts to open up a space that resists narratives that constrain and
delimit the lives of women, and allows for different stories to be told and
heard. This approach reflects some of the social changes that many of
the participants said they wanted from their participation in this research:
I would like you use me as a case study to enlight people about refu-
gees and most especially about women refugees I think use this op-
portunity now pass the information. (May)2
Make a difference, make a difference. (Naomi)
2
Every attempt has been made to retain the words and expressions that each
woman used in their interview. I have consciously presented all of the womens
quotes verbatim and have not corrected grammatical errors.
35
Telling Stories
For women seeking asylum, where being granted asylum depends on the
credibility and authenticity of their stories of persecution (Kea and Rob-
erts-Holmes, 2013), the meaning of asylum can be profound. However,
stories about asylum (like all other stories) are contingent on the available
narratives that shape and inform what we know and can tell of asylum.
None of us are entirely free to tell any story and the articulation of sto-
ries is accomplished in relation to available narrative frameworks (Plum-
mer, 1995). Shaped, informed and constrained by the circumstances and
contexts in which we tell our stories, the relationship between narratives
and stories is necessary in order for stories to be understandable and
tellable (Andrews, 2014). Narratives impact the way in which story-
tellers understand, respond to, negotiate, and resist stories about their
lives. They can serve as powerful social forms of control (Lockwood,
forthcoming) influencing the particular stories told about certain groups
of people and also informing the stories that people tell. As such, our
lives are not simply represented in stories, but are produced through, and
at times constrained by, our own stories and the storytelling of others.
Storytelling may be a deeply personal process and activity, par-
ticularly when we talk about our lives. However, as Woodiwiss (2014:
13) suggests, In telling our stories we do not simply slot ourselves into
readymade narratives but we do draw on stories or narrative frameworks
that are currently circulating and these are both culturally and historically
specific. The subject positions that we take up within our stories may
serve to explain our actions and decisions, moderating the ways people
understand us. Through our storytelling, we can construct our identi-
ties, consciously or unconsciously. As such, those people seeking asylum
make sense of their lives and tell their stories in relation to dominant
narratives, whilst other asylum experiences will not fit neatly into these
narrative frameworks and their stories are at risk of being overlooked,
silenced, and unrecognized (Smith, 2015a, 2015b, forthcoming).
Seeking Asylum
Seeking asylum is not a new phenomenon; each year across the globe
women, children, and men seek asylum in other countries. A feature
of contemporary migratory movements, asylum seeking is frequently a
36
form of forced migration and an interrelated aspect of broader transna-

tional mobility that takes place across and within the national boundaries
of countries and states (Yuval-Davis et al., 2005). The social, political
and historical conditions under which women are forced to migrate has
meant that the vast majority of displaced women never claim asylum
(Freedman, 2008). Gendered relations and inequalities in different coun-
tries affect womens migration in varying ways and reduced access to the
necessary resources, such as documentation and finances, may enable
them more easily to migrate or constrain and limit their opportunities.
Those who are fleeing persecution or have been displaced primarily re-
main within their country of origin or cross an immediate border to
a neighboring (and potentially less prosperous) country, possibly living
within refugee camps (Hajdukowski-Ahmed, 2009).
Managing people who had been displaced from their countries of
origin and who seek the protection of other states has become an in-
creasing priority across Europe. In response to the gross human rights
atrocities and significant gaps in the protection of people that were
exposed in the latter half of the 20th century (particularly during the
First and Second World Wars), a legal form of asylum seeking emerged
(Chakrabarti, 2015; Sirriyeh, 2013). A number of international protocols
were developed and ratified as states sought to address the social, political
and historical context of migration, standardizing and globalizing state
responses (Malkki, 1996). The concept of international protection is en-
shrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted 10
December 1948 UNGA Res 217 A(III) (UDHR) art 5) which specifies,
Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy asylum from persecution
in other countries (Article 14). The Declaration sets out fundamental
human rights to be universally protected and marks a clear acknowledge-
ment of common standards for all peoples and all nations. The 1951
United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (Refugee
Convention), and 1967 Protocol, form the legal basis for states to grant
asylum and it is intended to ensure the rights, protection and provision
for the adequate treatment of refugees. The principle of protecting refu-
gees was formed on the basis that signatory States were legally bound to
provide protection.
37
All contracting States who have ratified the Refugee Convention

are able to grant asylum to individuals they feel demonstrate compat-
ibility with the Refugee Convention definition of a refugee, or refuse
people who they feel do not. The product of a particular time, the refu-
gee definition is underpinned by the core principle of non-refoulement,
which asserts that a refugee should not be returned to a country where
they face serious threats to their life or freedom and dominated by the
concept of male persecution within the political and public spheres.
Gender-based persecution (amongst a number of other forms of perse-
cution) is omitted as a determining factor for receiving refugee status and
the gendered language of the definition overlooks the serious threats to
the lives or freedoms of a number of groups, including women and girls
(Sirriyeh, 2013). As such, one particular narrative framework to emerge
in the twenty-first century is that of the male political refugee, a mor-
ally untouchable category (Cohen, 2002: xix) synonymous with a gen-
uine need for international protection. Informed by definitions and
judgments of refugees being genuine and men, women have been
primarily viewed as the dependents of the political activities of men and
not genuine (Freedman, 2008; Hunt, 2005; Yuval-Davis et al., 2005).
The Hate Figure

As Plummer states: different moments have highlighted different sto-
ries (1995: 4) and as societies change, so stories change (1995: 79).
Stories about the protection of other human beings have become in-
creasingly fragile and complex, with Britain an especially bad point in
case (Chakrabarti, 2015). Political, legal and public debates have pro-
duced endless discussions and generated doubt and concern about the
motivations and legitimacy of those seeking asylum (Hunt, 2005; Yu-
val-Davis et al., 2005). In the last two decades, whilst the story of the
genuine refugee has been maintained in various diminishing forms,
those seeking asylum have become storied as hate figures and clear
signals sent out that they are unwelcome others (Chakrabarti, 2015).
The hate figure is constructed through a number of intersecting sto-
ries, including the distinct term bogus asylum seeker (Cohen, 2002)
which emerged in the early 1990s in the media. This concept gave rise
to a problematic binary that a persons asylum claim (and indeed the
38
person claiming asylum) could be either genuine or false. Indeed,

the bogus asylum seeker solidified the belligerent notion that people
seeking asylum are not genuine refugees and are actually attempting to
exploit public generosity and governments, and are unworthy of public
sympathy or support (Kea and Roberts-Holmes, 2013).
Successive governments have contributed to the creation of the
hate figure which includes stories of asylum seekers as illegal and
threatening, positioning those seeking asylum as a threat to welfare ben-
efits, public spending, employment opportunities and to national iden-
tity (Cohen, 2002; Hunt, 2005; Jordan and Dvell, 2003; Sirriyeh, 2013;
Yuval-Davis et al., 2005). New measures have been instituted by govern-
ments including administrative detention, forced dispersal, and deporta-
tion. Much research over the last decade makes evident that the multiple
social exclusions and vulnerabilities experienced by those seeking asylum
emanate from a raft of damaging, tough, and punitive policies and prac-
tices brought to bear against them (Hunt, 2005; Tyler, 2006).
The dehumanization and denigration of people seeking asylum is
rarely as evident as in the narratives that have come to dominate in Brit-
ain (Chakrabarti, 2015). A study of media reports concerning asylum
seekers in Britain concluded that dominant narratives are generated and
reproduced through repeated accounts of suspicion, and that there is
public support for all efforts to deter migration, including potential ex-
clusion of those seeking asylum (Kundnani, 2001; Sirriyeh, 2013). The
hate figure has become a proxy for increased border enforcement and
security on border entry. As Andrews (2014: 88) argues narratives
play a critical role in creating and recreating history. In an increasingly
nationalistic and securitized era, the hate figure encompasses the ex-
clusion and dehumanization of those seeking asylum. This dominant
narrative serves to strengthen distinctions between those who are seek-
ing asylum and those who have been granted legal protection and are
recognized as genuine refugees.
The Female Victim

Until recently, asylum seeking has been storied as the province of men
and assumptions about the asylum seeker as male have prevailed.
Women seeking asylum have been overlooked and marginalized (Freed-
39
man, 2008; Hajdukowski-Ahmed, 2009). Where there is an emerging

body of research about women seeking asylum, narratives contain much
discussion about victimization and particular forms of gendered perse-
cutions. That gendered violence against women takes place during con-
flict and war has long been recognized, and is increasingly documented.
Citing the ways in which women seeking asylum are commonly under-
stood as victims of sexual violence, campaigners and political organiza-
tions have suggested women are also constantly under assault and per-
petually victimized (Womankind, 2012). The literature assumes a linear
progression and as a result of the trauma associated with such atrocities,
women seeking asylum are often understood to be traumatized by vio-
lence (Herlihy and Turner, 2007). This is a story that relies on particular
understandings of sexual violence and gendered victimization in which
women seeking asylum are seen as: de-selved disposed, disorientated,
dislocated, dismembered, stateless, nameless, landless, homeless, and
powerless (Hajdukowski-Ahmed, 2009: 38). Those women whose expe-
riences do not fit within this narrative may be left outside of the female
victim story, unrecognized and silenced.
Victimization and gendered persecution typically characterize sto-
ries told about women seeking asylum, making it very difficult to tell
their stories of agency and/or resistance. The dominant narrative of the
female victim (Smith, 2014, 2015a, 2015b, forthcoming) has contribut-
ed to a heightened awareness and understanding of women seeking asy-
lum as vulnerable and much of the literature on women seeking asylum
has exposed the disproportionately huge numbers of women being vic-
timized in war (UNWomen, 2011; Womankind, 2012). These stories are
often told as an attempt to increase legal protection and human rights for
individual women and groups of women, and to expose undeniable poor
treatments and abuses of women with the aim of improving their lives.
However, the ongoing story of the victimization of women seeking asy-
lum is told at a cost and has meant that (some) women have stop[ped]
being [viewed as] specific persons and become pure victims in general
(Malkki, 1996: 378).
Stories about the female victim have become integral to domi-
nant narratives told about women seeking asylum, providing (some)
women with a framework within which to have their asylum claims rec-
40
ognized (Kea and Roberts-Holmes, 2013). Required by the Home Office

to provide an asylum story as the central component of their asylum
claim, being granted legal protection as a refugee demands a person es-
tablish their identity as a victim a person who has a well-founded
fear of being persecuted (Refugee Convention). Shuman and Bohmer
(2014: 952) note, applicants have to be willing to present themselves
in those terms, as persecuted and not protected. [to] portray them-
selves as victims of persecution. By producing their own victim identi-
ties, women can negotiate and resist the difficulties posed by the asylum
decision-making process (Smith, 2014, 2015b).
The growing awareness about womens migration and their role as
caregivers and mothers has produced a further narrative synonymous
with the female victim. The grouping of women and children togeth-
er has become a popular way of representing women and a substantial
amount of literature perpetuates the association between the two groups
(Hajdukowski-Ahmed, 2009). Cultural perceptions of normative gen-
dered behavior, with women as mothers, play a role in dominant nar-
ratives told about women seeking asylum. This is often done to highlight,
in terms of numbers, the scale of the problem. For example, in 2016,
the United National High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) put out
the statement just over 55 per cent of those arriving [on the shores of
Europe] are women and children, as compared to only 27 per cent in
June 2015 (UNHCR, 2016). The propensity to amalgamate women and
children together potentially infantilizes and distorts any detailed under-
standing of womens lives and the vast differences between individual
women (and children).
When women do claim their status as storytelling subjects, judg-
ments are made about women in relation to decisions about their chil-
dren. Shuman and Bohmer (2014: 948) argue, in some cases [asylum]
judges decided that the behaviour of a woman was not credible because
she didnt conform to their expectations about motherhood, for example
by leaving her children behind with relatives when she fled. Sometimes
the reverse is true and mothers seeking asylum are not deemed credible
because they didnt flee immediately but waited until they could flee with
their children. These assumptions underpin dominant narratives which
shape and constrain the stories women tell and prevent (some) women
41
from emerging as subjects with their own needs beyond those associated
with children.
Listening to Womens Stories

Listening to the stories of women seeking asylum was a starting point
of the research which informs this paper. I conducted in-depth narra-
tive interviews with seventeen women which were tape-recorded and
later transcribed. The interviews lasted between one and a half and three
hours and were carried out in a wide range of different locations across
the UK. The women had been living in the UK for different periods
of time, ranging from a couple of months to seven years. They were
aged between their early 20s and mid-50s and came from 14 different
countries of origin: Algeria, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Gambia, India, Kenya,
Malawi, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, Sierra-Leone, Somalia, South Africa
and Zimbabwe. To safeguard their anonymity, their names were replaced
with pseudonyms and, to facilitate a more participatory approach, the
women chose their own pseudonyms (including Z, who wanted to be
known by the 26th and final letter of the modern English Alphabet).
Every effort has been made to ensure that no information could lead to
a participant being identified.
All of the women had made a claim for asylum in the UK and at the
time of the research interviews were at different stages of their asylum
claims process. However, it was not an intention of the research to ques-
tion the credibility of the stories that women tell when they claim asy-
lum, but rather to value and listen to womens stories. Also, the analysis
was not intended to listen to the participants stories in order to validate
the truth or authenticity of their lived experiences, but rather sought
to ask questions about the accounts so that we can begin to understand
not only the stories, but the context of the lives that informed those ac-
counts. Asking questions about womens stories can enable us to look
beyond dominant narratives to explore the constraints to those stories,
exposing and potentially resisting those constraints and opening up other
possibilities for womens lives.
Recognizing that data analysis is a site where the power of the re-
searcher may be particularly pronounced (Doucet and Mauthner, 2008),
choosing an appropriate form of analysis was important. As Mauthner
42
and Doucet (1998: 139) foreground, analysis is a crucial stage of the

research as it carries the potential to decrease or amplify the volume
of our respondents voices. How we come to know narrated subjects
relies strongly on our own subjectivities and reflexivity on the part of
the researcher to explore the interpretations they bring to the analysis
and research process (Doucet and Mauthner, 2008). The method that I
utilized is a reflexive and multi-layered interpretive approach called the
Listening Guide (Doucet and Mauthner, 2008; Mauthner and Doucet,
1998, 2003). This feminist narrative method of data analysis provides a
research process that can disrupt and challenge dominant narratives told
about womens lives. Described as a resisting listeners guide, it enables
listeners to bring a different subjectivity to bear upon the old universal-
ity (Brown and Gilligan, 1992: 16).
Once the interview transcripts were collected, I carried out a mini-
mum of four sequential readings, outlined in the Listening Guide, across
the individual transcripts (Mauthner and Doucet, 2003). Simultaneously,
the Listening Guide was used to listen to the women as agentic storytell-
ing subjects whose lives are produced by their stories and who play an
active role in reacting to, intervening in and resisting dominant narra-
tives. Paying close attention to their stories and working slowly, I was able
to stay with the data (Doucet and Mauther, 2008: 129). As Plummer
(2013: 212) states,
stories are never transparent all at once: they are rarely immediately
clear. Narrative understanding requires the space to sit and stare, pon-
der and puzzle and life often does not offer such a space. But like a
slow moving veil or curtain, the wisdoms of our stories can be revealed
gradually. We grasp our meanings slowly, bit by bit. We need time to
appreciate stories.
I considered the question of why and how women told their stories
and this process helped me to re-visit my understandings of how par-
ticular dominant narratives informed and constrained (some) womens
stories.
43
Hearing Resistance and Ruination

The women used the interviews as a site and context to establish ac-
counts of sexual violence and persecution and that they feared persecu-
tion if they were returned to their countries of origin. As I listened to the
womens stories of persecution, I came to understand that their stories
had inter-related narrative frameworks embedded within them, many of
which have been overlooked in the formation of dominant narratives.
I identified these as analytical frameworks of resistance and ruination,
working in relation to each other as resources for telling and listening to
the womens stories and also making reflexive connections with my own
activities and struggles. My stories of resistance were not the same but
were relationally entwined with those of the women in this study and it
became important to define and distinguish what I meant by resistance
within the womens stories.
Concepts of resistance are frequently bound up with acts of resis-
tance and everyday actions cast as resistance that can be considered as
effective or ineffective (Scott, 1985; Riessman, 2000). Non-compliance
as opposition to social relations has become a popular way of delineating
resistance and a wide range of oppositional activities have been consid-
ered resistance, from overt acts of challenge to more subtle forms of
survival (Katz, 2004; Scott, 1985). Troubling the notions of resistance
as visible to an external audience, Bosworth and Carrabine (2001) ac-
knowledge personal or intimate activities, as well as practices and behav-
iors of resistance in response to a subtle and complex set of different
circumstances and situations. Particularly relevant to studies of women
and resistance, Catherine Riessmans (2000) analysis of the stigma of
childlessness in India suggests that women negotiated and mitigated the
stigma through a range of everyday resistance strategies. Also, Lila Abu-
Lugoeds (1990) study of control over sexuality and marriage illustrates
the different ways that Bedouin women attempted to use humor and cre-
ate folklore through shared tales as a form of resistance. These studies
both highlight diverse of forms that gendered resistance has taken.
Given the popularity of the concept of resistance, scholars have
argued that resistance has become such an inclusive and romantic term
that it is identified by researchers in everything and seen everywhere
(Abu-Lugoed, 1990; Katz, 2004). Concepts of resistances have also been
44
criticized for misattribute[ing] womens stories with intentions where

none exists (Abel and Browner, 1998: 322). Providing a useful depar-
ture point to make sense of the stories of women seeking asylum, I
utilized the analytical framework of resistances developed by Cindi Katz
(2004). Opposed to ambiguous definitions of the term resistance, Katz
(2004) makes conceptual distinctions between resistance and the more
subtle forms of resilience and reworking which resonate with the
stories of women in my research. Seeking to build on, conserve and
identify womens personal resources within their stories, Katzs (2004)
three frameworks of resistance identify the capacities and potentialities
that people have for promoting change, sustaining themselves and their
communities when faced with adversity.
Utilizing a nuanced understanding of resistance that is both con-
textual and relational, I argue here for a shift in perception in the way
we look at womens stories. Katz (2004) assumes that through her ob-
servations, knowledge of resistance, reworking, and resilience become
accessible, privileging a notion of resistance as an inherent, natural and
individual attribute that one has or does not have. However, my interest
in the role of resistance in this paper is premised on a different un-
derstanding. Taking a feminist narrative approach to womens stories,
I used the concepts of resistance within a narrative framework (Frank,
1995; Plummer, 1995; Doucet and Mauthner, 2008). The argument here
is not for resistance as individualized, oppositional behavior/actions that
reflect whether a womans actions have or do not have transformative
effects (Riessman, 2000: 130), but rather a nuanced understanding of
resistance to explore womens stories. In this, I take my cue from Katzs
(2004) delineations of resistances, but use these concepts as narrative
frameworks to explore the different ways resistance is constructed within
womens stories.
As I listened to the womens stories, I also turned to the worrying
attribute of resistance that has asserted a tragic story and demanded an
aspirational heroic figure. As Conlon (2007: 206) suggests, people seek-
ing asylum are sometimes burdened with telling stories of themselves as
heroes in the face of omnipotent forces. Expectation of resistance
has given rise to euphoric celebrations of the resourcefulness of human
spirit (Langer, 1991: xi). Heroic attributes of resistance are examples
45
of narrative frameworks that can constrain the stories of women seek-

ing asylum. Drawing on work of Arthur Frank, I utilized the analytical
framework of Franks (1995) Chaos narrative. Franks work explores
stories of critical illness told in relation to the body and he outlines the
storyline of the chaos narrative, which imagines life never getting
better (1995: 97). The Chaos narrative reveals a life of vulnerability,
futility, and impotence (Frank, 1995: 97) and stories are manifest with
moments of irreparable wreckage (Frank, 1995: 110). These story-
lines served to develop what I have called the narrative of ruination, the
fourth narrative framework which I use to explore womens stories.
Narratives of Women Seeking Asylum

My analysis produced four overarching narratives that framed the wom-
ens stories. I identify these frameworks as the narratives of resistance,
reworking, resilience and ruination. In this section of the paper, I explore
the participants lives through their stories in order to make sense of how
and why they might tell the stories they do. Maintaining the relationship
between the different narrative frameworks, and hearing them as neces-
sarily relational, avoids any one of the narratives becoming singular or
dominant. Important too is the understanding that these four narratives
are types of stories and are not intended to be representative of different
types of women seeking asylum.
1. The Narrative of Resistance

The narrative of resistance is used as an opportunity for the women to
tell stories of challenge and as a result these are also stories that directly
challenge some of the dominant narratives told about women seeking
asylum. Rather than focusing on the ways in which they survive and en-
dure (the narrative of resilience), or telling stories of indirect resistances
(the narrative of reworking), I illustrate the ways some women told sto-
ries of their political consciousness-building and oppositional activities
and agendas. Speaking out about their solidarity with other women, they
storyed their commitment to improving the lives of women seeking asy-
lum which was part of participating in the research. Taking up active
subject positions as protagonists within their stories, resistance was sto-
ried as an active initiative that involved direct challenges and contesting
46
situations of oppression and conditions of exploitation. Suggesting they

are political subjects (Cohen, 2002), these stories develop our under-
standings of women asylum seekers as political refugees, challenging
the concept of the political refugee as male which is embedded in
the origins of the Refugee Convention, and negates the passivity of the
female victim.
Challenge
At the forefront of some womens stories, they revealed how they want-
ed to be understood as political activists. Z suggests: I was involved,
especially with the womans rights. For Lucy, her activism was related
to human rights: I joined human rights work. Telling stories about
being involved with activities that work for human rights, these women
refuted dominant narratives of passivity and stigma. In constructing a
political sense of self and the activities in their lives, these women re-
positioned themselves as political figures, who actively engage in impor-
tant political struggles. Claims about their activities in the past allowed
the women to make declarations about their present and political cam-
paigning. Bintou suggested that she was challenging the arrangement of
polygamous marriage3 and levirate marriage4, both of which she said
she had experienced and resisted. Shimmar suggested she was a victim
of a child/early marriage5 in the UK. Brought into the UK, she said she
became the victim of years of abuse perpetrated by family members.
Locked in the marital home, not allowed to open the front door and for-
bidden to look out of the window, Shimmar said she was active in trying
to end this type of abuse: woman like me they are helping to stop it and
help woman.
A number of women also told stories about their roles as protago-
nists, struggling to challenge inequalities about wider issues. For Pre-
cious, campaigning for gay rights, as a direct response to the sexuality
of her youngest brother and the subsequent discrimination and abuse
3
Marriage to more than one spouse.
4
A marriage in which a widow is obliged to marry her deceased husbands
brother.
5
A formal marriage or informal union entered into by an individual before
reaching the age of 18.
47
he had experienced, was important: I had to fight hard against these

attitudes for gay rights.
Utilizing their personal experiences as political stories, the women
suggested a sense of their entitlement to speak out. This included the
different ways in which some women storied the asylum system as deeply
problematic. A number of women said they had attempted to challenge
attitudes and improve the hostile environment. May, for example, out-
lined how she tried to change the general publics attitude to the term
refugee:
there should be more understanding about diversity and equal rights

and experience that surround the word refugee which we promote.
Promote to the people and keep talking about it. (May)
Some of the activities that women took part in contributed to
building resistance (Katz, 2004). The women constructed their role in
changing the broader publics views and challenging politicians on asy-
lum policies. For Naomi, this included campaigning and the associated
risks of publicly speaking out against the practice of detention:
my aim was to talk about child detention and I received a lot of

support I made a lot of links with the media, lots and it was quite
tremendous I was like putting my life down for the sake of helping
other people. (Naomi)
Speaking up and speaking out was an important part of being iden-
tified as political. By taking part in this study, a number of the women
indicated their solidarity with other women and their commitment to
improving the situations of women seeking asylum. For May, taking part
in the research was about improving asylum policy: I like to take part
in this research because want to improve the policy for women refugee.
I like the voice of women to be heard and for women to be respected
(May).
Highlighting their determination, several of the women spoke
about challenging the inequalities that women face. As May said: no
matter who you are, no matter where you are, all you have to do is have a
view, walk towards it and be determined I believe there is nothing you
48
cannot do. Anne-Laure also talked about being a source of inspiration

for other women: showing other women the chances or possibili-
ties. Central to many of these accounts was the suggestion that the
lives of women seeking asylum contained wider lessons. As Naomi ar-
gued: I thought I should contribute to this research so that my story
can be part of a lesson (Naomi).
Speaking as agentic subjects who honored their own stories, a num-
ber of the women suggested that their own situations might not be im-
proved by their political activity, but they worked for the greater good
of all women. Bintou suggested: I know I may not benefit from it now,
but in future if it is positive that women can benefit from it. Queenie
also noted: what I said can be contributed to making refugee woman
that comes, or asylum seeker, their life a little bit easier. The narrative of
resistance illustrates that women seeking asylum tell stories within which
they wish to be viewed as protagonists, engaged in resistance activities.
Striving to be viewed as activists, the interview itself was a site of protest
where they suggested lessons could be learned.
2. The Narrative of Reworking

The narrative of reworking is heavily orientated to stories of indirect re-
sistance. The storyteller is able to construct positive self-meanings, albeit
constrained by dominant narratives that position women asylum seekers
as hate figures. Different to the narrative of resilience which enables
women to emphasize the ways in which they survived their situations,
the narrative of reworking illustrates some of the ways women attempt
to change and negotiate the identity of being an asylum seeker. Some of
the women suggested the ways they construct more positive self-mean-
ings that distinguished them from being identified as an asylum seeker,
which avoided being seen as a hate figure. I also illustrate the ways
some women lay claim to their own legitimacy and validated their asylum
identities through stories of persecution and by calling attention to the
severe consequences for them and their children if they are refused asy-
lum and deported. These stories negotiate the dominant narrative of the
female victim and offer further understandings about this narrative, as
well as upholding the dominant narrative of the genuine refugee.
49
Indirect Resistance
Some women spoke about the difficulties of being identified as an asy-
lum seeker or refugee and the ways in which it attracts vilification. For
Precious, being identified as a refugee was: Horrible. Crazy. I dont want
to be a refugee its not nice to be. Similarly, Lucy emphasized some
of the problems of being an asylum seeker: Its not a good term You
feel dehumanised when you are seeking asylum. You dont have dignity.
The dominant narrative of the hate figure was understood by many of
the women and they suggested it was deeply problematic for their every-
day lives. A number of the women gave numerous accounts of the ways
in which they felt they had been badly treated as a result of being identi-
fied as an asylum seeker or refugee. Bintou indicated that if you are an
asylum seeker in the UK: You are not welcome. Similarly, Queenie
argued that people distinguished between people: I think people who
dont realise youre a refugee they treat you different. Once they realise
youre refugee its another story altogether.
In order to distinguish themselves from being identified as an
asylum seeker, several of the women told stories about the ways they
construct alternative stories. For Love, her story was bound up in the
romantic notion of seeking love: I always call myself love-seeker not
asylum-seeker. Shimmar also said she had chosen a less problematic
identity and only told people she was an asylum seeker when neces-
sary:
I dont tell anyone I am an asylum seeker say Im just study here...

I dont want to tell. If I dont need to tell you than I dont tell you.
(Shimmar)
Avoiding being identified as asylum seekers and offering differ-
ing accounts of their presence in the UK, a number of the women ne-
gotiated being identified as hate figures. Constrained by the available
narratives, the women cast themselves in new stories (Katz, 2004).
While some of the participants said they did not want to be identi-
fied as asylum seekers, many of them suggested there was another po-
tentially more positive identity. Utilizing the dominant narrative of the
genuine refugee (Hunt, 2005; Yuval-Davis et al., 2005; Cohen, 2002),
50
some of the women emphasized the severe consequences for them if

they were refused asylum. A number of women said they would be killed
if they were returned to their country of origin. For Gloria, being sent
home was a death sentence: sending me back to my country is
like sending me back to my grave. Bintou and Diane also suggested
they would die if they are deported from the UK: It would be death to
go home and I will die if they deport me. Anne-Laure said that she
would be killed: I will be killed back home. Highlighting her own legiti-
macy, Bintou argued that she is concerned for the sexual abuse her chil-
dren would suffer if the family was to be deported: if she [daugh-
ter] goes back to [country of origin] now shell be circumcised again
shell be cut [FGM]. Illustrated through the narrative of reworking, the
women suggested they are genuine refugees because of persecution
and the lack of State protection in their home countries. Through their
stories, women were also able to indirectly resist other motivations that
may have been associated with seeking asylum.
3. The Narrative of Resilience

The most subtle aspect of resistance is heard in the narrative of re-
silience, illustrating the different ways women survive and endure their
lives in the face of great adversity. Different from the narrative of re-
sistance and reworking (stories about challenge and indirect resistance),
the narrative of resilience is used to emphasize the difficulties and pain
of womens situations. I focus here on the ways in which the women
suggested they survived and endured living apart from their children.
As I have previously suggested in this paper, great significance is often
attached to the female victim and the role of women and children
in relation to women seeking asylum (Freedman, 2008; Hajdukowski-
Ahmed, 2009). However, none of the women who participated in this
research had all of their children living with them. Whilst existing nar-
ratives can provide meaning about mothering, women seeking asylum,
who have seemingly fled without their children, may find it difficult to
access good mothering narratives. Despite their situations, a number
of the women described the diverse ways in which they protected and
cared for their children. Living apart was in many ways the ultimate en-
51
durance, premised on their identities as good protective mothers meeting

the needs associated with their children.
Survival and Endurance

Through their accounts of living apart from their children, many of
the women suggested they were breaking with deeply held beliefs about
mothering. Constructing stories of the pain of being separated and
leaving her children behind, Queenie said: Thats what makes me sad
mostly. Its being separated from my son. Similarly Bintou suggests:
it was very difficult having to leave them behind. Its difficult. Whatever
choices the women said they had made about living apart from their chil-
dren, separation was always constructed as a difficult decision, endured
rather than embraced.
Reinforcing the tenacious link between women and children that
ultimately upholds a gendered order of society with good mothers as
child-centred and emotionally involved with their children (Hays, 1996;
Lockwood, 2013), a major preoccupation for some of the women was
to defend themselves against being seen as bad mothers (Kielty, 2008;
Lockwood, 2013). The limited storylines which exist in relation to good
mothering narratives are narrowly defined and as Gustafson (2005: 1)
reminds us few mothers are more stigmatised than those living apart
from their children. However, what constitutes good mothering may
be constructed differently by women seeking asylum. A number of the
women spoke about how they had sought to secure their childrens sur-
vival. For Precious, leaving her children was a safer option for the chil-
dren than bringing them. Queenie also suggested that her sons safety
was of primary concern: It was awful, really awful, and I was getting
scared for my son just feeling he is safe outweighs all this (Queenie).
Emphasizing how they had faced uncertain and dangerous journeys to
seek asylum, a number of women presented themselves as protectors of
their children. The decision not to bring their children on asylum jour-
neys was constructed as a way to protect and minimize potential harm
to their children.
A number of the women suggested their lives were further com-
plicated and they had to make choices between their children. Striving
to make sense of their decisions, some women discussed why they had
52
brought one or two of their children with them on asylum journeys,

leaving other children behind. For Love, the process of deciding which
child/ren to bring and which child/ren to leave was primarily explained
by the constraints of her financial situation: because of the amount
of money I had, I couldnt get both children. I brought one and I left the
other. Establishing that finances influenced the decision, Love indicates
the logic of her decision given the practical restraints she had faced. Bin-
tou outlined that it was not a choice: I am not able to bring the five of
them so I ran away with the two. Her rationale for bringing two children
emphasized the risks posed by leaving the oldest boy and the issue of
treating girls and boys equally:
I brought the eldest son and the eldest daughter, because I had two
boys and two girls and then a boy in our culture they target the first
born and if they dont get to the mum then they get to the first born
boy. So to be fair I could not bring two boys and leave two girls there
so I bring the first boy and the eldest girl. Thats what I did. (Bintou)
The womens choices were limited and often difficult, but emo-
tional care and consideration for their children was underlined. Whilst
Naomi said she had to do things quickly, she also spoke about how she
had made plans and explained the preparation that went into protecting
her children: I started preparing and saving money to move away and I
had to take my children away and hide them somewhere. Talking about
the potential risks to her children, financial considerations and the prac-
ticalities of hiding her children, Naomi said she had made preparations
for the time when they would live apart.
Descriptions of preparation were important to the womens stories
about good mothering. Many of the women talked of the plans they
had put in place that fulfilled their responsibilities as good mothers
(Kielty, 2008; Lockwood, 2013). This included identifying other-mothers
(Collins, 2000), in the form of grandmothers and other close female rela-
tives, to care for their children. Living apart from their children (or some
of their children), maternal nurture was considered a vital component
for child well-being and some women said they had placed their children
in the care of close female family members who they felt they could
trust (Collins, 2000). Precious talked about leaving her children in the
53
care of her younger sister and the extended family. Queenie gave a de-
tailed description of how she had left her son with his devoted maternal
grandmother. Maximizing their stories of extended family connections
highlighted the ways their children were cared for and loved by large,
cohesive families (Falicov, 2007) and defended against the women being
seen as bad mothers.
Constructing themselves as resilient women who could meet the
challenges of living apart, some women also claimed they maintained
a mothering role (Falicov, 2007). Lucy said she made frequent contact
with her daughters through emails, phone calls, text messages and let-
ters. Queenie suggested: I ring and write whenever I can. It took a
great deal of endurance to maintain their mothering roles and sustain
their bonds with their children. Particularly difficult was the danger that
women felt they might put their children in, or the people who were
looking after their children. For Jen, this meant that she sustained con-
tact with her children covertly: dont tell anybody you talked to your
mum. While many of the women highlighted their efforts to ensure
their contact with their children, it was particularly difficult for women to
reconcile the constraints and complexities in which their lives have been
restricted and the elements that are beyond their control.
4. The Narrative of Ruination

Standing in some contrast to the narratives of resistance, reworking
and resilience, the narrative of ruination illustrates the diminishment of
womens lives. Forming the basis of an exploration of the discontinuity
of self and consistent with the chaos narrative (Frank, 1995), the nar-
rative of ruination is used to highlight the precarity of womens lives
and the ways in which their sense of self is fundamentally threatened
(Langer, 1991). These were inevitably difficult stories to hear, and whilst
I may have wished to find some hope in the womens stories, a num-
ber of women resisted any attempts to reach a comforting conclusion
(Langer, 1991: 69). Used to illustrate the ways some women struggle to
(re)claim a story, the narrative of ruination exposes the inadequacy of
dominant narratives. Delimiting (some) womens stories, the dominance
of available narratives does not accommodate the complexities and con-
tradictions of the lives of women seeking asylum and the inadequacy of
54
existing narratives leave some women narratively shipwrecked (Frank,

1995).
Diminishment
The stories of women seeking asylum are often restricted to responding
to the expectations and requirements of others. This is particularly pro-
nounced when the asylum system demands that a woman establish her
identity as a victim in order to be granted legal protection (Kea and Rob-
erts-Holmes, 2013; Shuman and Bohmer, 2014). Some of the women
were unable to construct a story that reconciles seeking asylum and being
recognized as a genuine refugee. Whilst these storytellers constructed a
sense of their own agency, this often emerged from a position of relative
powerlessness. Unlike the narrative of reworking, the construction of
the genuine refugee is impeded through stories of being identified as a
liar and disbelieved by people in positions of power. Being identified as a
liar was deeply problematic for a number of the women. As Plummer
(1995: 167) suggests victims know only too well the frequent charge
that they are simply making up their stories and similarly, women seek-
ing asylum are also frequently accused of simply making up their stories.
Several of the women said they had been called liars by the Judge or
Home Office caseowner:
they dont believe me. I am liar. I am this. I am that Everything I

tell them they dont believe me. (Diane)
when we went to court, yes the judge he called me a liar (Bintou)
he write it on my immigration statement that she is lying he

wouldnt listen to me as a woman seeking asylum. (May)
she [Home Office] started screaming at me, its rubbish what Im

telling her... its lies (Lucy)
Some of the women said these accusations had led to problems
with being granted asylum. A number of women had been refused asy-
lum as a result of being disbelieved in their asylum accounts. This was
seen by some as a powerful rejection and dismissal that signaled a lack of
55
hope. Diane suggested the Home Office refusal to grant her asylum had
a devastating effect on her life:
I came here for help. If they dont want to help me they have to explain
why me everybody is like me is asylum you know. If they dont help,
why just every time my life they send me miserable letters. If I open it
every time they refuse, refuse. (Diane)
Unlike the narrative of resilience, which illustrated the different
ways women survive and endure in the face of great adversity, the nar-
rative of ruination emphasizes their sense of utter powerlessness and
abandonment.
they [Home Office] came with a refusal and they said my claim
has been abandoned that case has been abandoned the appeal has
been abandoned all abandoned. (Bintou)
Whilst stories of good mothering (highlighted through the nar-
rative of resilience) often provided a sense of purpose, equally the narra-
tive of ruination illustrates repeated threats to mothering identities. Such
stories incorporate negative feelings of impending death. For example,
the diminished possibilities of the future and the precarious situation of
her childrens future were concerns of Bintou. Precious also suggested
she was going to die and her grave concerns for her children:
they refused me and it was hard what am I going to do now? The

next thing is like Im going to die and then if Im going to die, what is
going to happen to my kids? What is it going to happen to my children?
(Precious)
Constructing the refusal of her asylum claim and the consequences
of the negative decision as an irreparable disruption and utter dismissal,
Diane said she could see no way forward with her life. The ever-present
risk of removal from the UK was an unbearable anticipated future in
Dianes story:
So many times, you dont believe me I was just trying to kill myself.
Many, many times. But I didnt die. I dont know. I did it very hard to
die because it was too much for me I been on tribunal court and they
56
refused me He [the Judge] say Your case is dismissed. You are not
allowed to do anything in this country. As soon as possible you have to
leave. (Diane)
By casting doubt on her asylum story, the pivotal point of refusal
revoked any hope for Diane. Shrouded in stories of dismissal and re-
jection, several of the women dismiss any possible hope that claiming
asylum might have provided.
Being a victim is a prerequisite for being granted asylum, but for
some women this proves to be an inadequate framework within which to
tell their stories of persecution and asylum. Those who had been refused
asylum or disbelieved alluded to their disconnection to this narrative and
such frameworks prove inadequate for some women. Z suggested her
skepticism about whether she could be understood: you see yourself
you do not belong you feel that you will not be understood by other
people. Whilst Frank (1995) has argued that stories can heal and that
wounded storytellers are engaged in recovering their voices, the narra-
tive of ruination defies any sort of healing. Constrained by despair and
diminishment, the narrative of ruination does not offer the comfort and
protection of resistance. Exposing the inadequacy of dominant narra-
tives, the narrative of ruination illustrates the limitation of dominant
narratives and many of the women struggled to speak about events and
situations.
Conclusion
The concepts of international protection and fundamental human rights
to be universally protected are enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declara-
tion of Human Rights and the 1951 Refugee Convention. Constructed
around the concept of the male political refugee, gender-based persecu-
tion was omitted as a determining factor for receiving refugee status and
the stories of women refugees have been largely ignored, overlooked and
marginalized. However, stories about women seeking asylum in the 21st
century have changed. The pervasiveness of political, legal and public
debates has led to people seeking asylum increasingly storied as hate
figures and women seeking asylum being understood as female vic-
tims, bereft of capacity and unendingly victimized. The dominance of
57
these narratives means that women seeking asylum may find themselves
vilified and dehumanized by the stories they come to tell or that others
tell about them.
This paper contributes to the fields of feminist, narrative, and resis-
tance studies by suggesting that research processes can seek to challenge
the formation of narratives which come to dominate at the expense of
all other stories that could be told. Taking a feminist narrative approach,
I suggest there is an opportunity to add to different and diverse under-
standing of womens lives. The paper also contributes to insights about
how and why we might use narrative methods to explore womens lives
and demonstrates how stories and narrative frameworks that inform the
stories women tell can be constraining as well as potentially liberating. In-
deed, it has been my intention to include and highlight some of the ways
in which women seeking asylum negotiate, circumvent and resist domi-
nant narratives in their own storytelling. As this research has identified,
narrative frameworks can offer meaning, facilitating the construction
of a positive sense of self, and even in the most limiting environments
women are able to tell stories that resist problematic identities and de-
humanizing narratives. However, focused on the diverse and intersecting
lives of women seeking asylum, this paper is not simply a celebration of
womens stories. Acknowledging the role of dominant narratives, I raise
awareness of some of the limitations of reinforcing those dominant sto-
ries that can delimit womens lives.
Developing four narrative analytical frameworks to make sense of
how and why women tell their stories, this paper offers a critical theoreti-
cal engagement with the concepts of resistance and ruination. Drawing
on the narrative of resistance, the research suggests that some women
tell stories of challenge. Resisting the narrative of the political refu-
gee as male and the passivity of the female victim, some of the
women suggest they are political subjects and protagonists involved in
consciousness-building and oppositional activities and agendas. In this
context, these stories challenge us to recognize women as agentic. Draw-
ing on the narrative of reworking, the research explores some of the
ways in which a number of womens stories of change highlight their
indirect resistance. Constructing positive self-meanings, some women at-
tempt to change and negotiate the identity of being an asylum seeker or
58
claim their own legitimacy through stories of persecution. Drawing on

the narrative of resilience, the research emphasizes that some women
tell stories about the different ways they survive and endure living apart
from their children, calling attention to the difficulties and pain of their
situations. These stories illustrated their agency but also restricted them
from emerging as a subject with their own needs beyond those associated
with good mothering.
Delimiting womens possibilities for making sense of their experi-
ences, dominant narratives directed some women to construct themselves
as diminished and a number of women were narratively shipwrecked
(Frank, 1995). Bringing awareness to the inadequacy and limitations of
narratives told about women seeking asylum, a number of women ex-
plored the discontinuity of self and the precarity of womens lives. These
stories suggest that some women are constrained by responding to the
expectations and requirements of others, including those in a position
of power making judgments on their asylum claims. Drawing on the
narrative of ruination exposes the inadequacy of dominant narratives
which do not accommodate some of the complexities and contradic-
tions of womens lives. Whilst the narratives of resistance, reworking
and resilience may reassure the listener, the narrative of ruination is a
powerful story that challenges the listener to abandon orderly responses,
placing a compelling responsibility on the listener. Important in helping
us appreciate our own (potentially privileged) situations, the narrative of
ruination may also challenge us to be transformed and compelled to use
our capacities and activism.
Contributing to the fields of feminist and narrative research within
the context of resistance studies and practices, the analysis opens up a
critical space that highlights the importance of narrative forms of resis-
tance and consequently enriches our understanding of the diversity of
forms of feminized resistance. Where womens lives and sense of self
could not be expressed within available narrative frameworks and they
struggled to speak about events and situations, this research emphasizes
how and why some women might be constrained and limited by domi-
nant narratives. When we research womens lives, it is an imperative to be
aware of the social, political and historical contexts that form the basis
of dominant narrative frameworks. These particular contexts shape the
59
stories that are available and can be used to make sense of womens lives,
but they also constrain and delimit (some) women. Listening to womens
stories, and asking why and how women might tell the stories they do,
can create new and different narratives which accommodate some of the
complexities and contradictions of womens lives. In researching wom-
ens lives, there is an opportunity to contribute to a greater understand-
ings of the diversity of those lives. New narrative frameworks open up
the possibilities for women to tell their own stories and women seeking
asylum are already shifting, expanding, and transforming the frameworks
of our times through the narratives of resistance, reworking, resilience
and ruination.
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64
LIZ MASON-DEESE UNEMPLOYED WORKERS MOVEMENTS
Unemployed Workers Movements

and the Territory of Social
Reproduction1
Liz Mason-Deese
University of North Carolina, US
Abstract
Unemployment soared in Argentina when the country fell into economic crisis in
the late 1990s. Amid these dire circumstances, women took the lead in organiz-
ing resistance to the neoliberal policies that had caused the crisis, as well as in
developing everyday alternative practices that would allow thousands of people to
survive the crisis without support from the state. Out of these actions the unem-
ployed workers movements were formed, which became well-known for organizing
large roadblocks on major highways across the country and for creating alterna-
tive economic practices. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper
examines the role of women in the unemployed workers movements of the urban
periphery in Buenos Aires. It argues that one of the movements main achieve-
ments was politicizing and making visible issues of social reproduction. The paper
shows how organizing around social reproduction involves a new spatiality of
struggle privileging spaces of everyday life in the neighborhood and a form
of politics that prioritizes creating new social relations and increasing democratic
control over everyday life. The paper goes on to explore the alternative economic
practices and autonomous forms of social reproduction created by the unemployed
workers movements in the territories in which they operate.
1
I would like to thank the Inter-American Foundation for their financial sup-
port for this research. I also wish to thank Sara Motta, Tiina Seppl, and the
anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback, as well as Nathan Swanson for
his help. Of course, my utmost gratitude goes to all the MTD members who
shared their time and thoughts with me.
65
Introduction
The roadblocks... they were massive. On one end were the burning
tires, huge piles of them to stop traffic from passing, and we were
ready, with sticks, ready for repression. But it was not just this, there
was also the cooking and eating together, sitting around the fire playing
guitar and singing There were children too, we took care of them to-
gether; there was a medical tent in case someone was injured. We took
care of everything ourselves. In reality, we were finding another way of
living together. (Interview, October, 2011, La Matanza)
These roadblocks were the unemployeds way of blocking the day-to-
day functioning of capitalism, since they had been denied a workplace
in which to strike. In small cities in rural Argentina, whole communi-
ties joined the roadblocks to protest layoffs after the privatization of
the state-run oil company (Dinerstein, 2001; Dinerstein, Contartese, and
Deledicque, 2010; Svampa and Pereyra, 2009).
In the peripheries of major cities, the unemployed began assem-
bling in response to rising inflation and cuts to social services (Flores,
2005; Colectivo Situaciones and MTD de Solano, 2002). Women were
particularly affected by these neoliberal measures and often took the lead
in organizing against them (Auyero, 2003). Roadblocks were extremely
effective in forcing both local administrations and the federal govern-
ment to provide aid to the poor and unemployed, including food as-
sistance, new jobs programs, unemployment benefits and other social
programs. The mobilized unemployed became known as piqueteros for
this tactic and soon coalesced into more concrete organizations (Mazzeo,
2004; Svampa and Pereyra, 2009).
However, rather than understanding the unemployed workers
movements as either a less effective labor movement or as a new social
movement in opposition to the labor movement, I argue that the unem-
ployed workers organizations still focus on labor but expand their defi-
nition of labor to include social reproduction. Dinerstein has challenged
the idea that the struggles of the unemployed are reactive and defensive,
showing that they make three contributions: 1) constituting a labour
collective and an identity of resistance that also challenged many of the
66
assumptions and practices of the labour movement (2014: 1040); 2)

implementing cooperative and productive projects in the communi-
ties and neighbourhoods (1043); and 3) influencing state policy (1044).
Here I focus on how the unemployed workers movements organized
around social reproduction to demonstrate how politicizing reproduc-
tive labor marks a feminization of resistance, simultaneously addressing
the roots of womens subordination and challenging the reproduction of
capitalism itself.
This article takes the perspective of social reproduction to show
not only how women were particularly affected by neoliberal structural
adjustment and austerity measures, but also how their participation and
leadership shaped the unemployed workers movements. I will show how
these movements politicized reproductive labor by making it visible and
actively organizing around issues related to reproduction, such as hunger,
healthcare, housing, and education. I will then analyze how organizing
around reproduction, and the key role of women in doing so, implies
a different sense of the political, which decenters the spaces and institu-
tions of the state in order to privilege territorial organizing in the spaces
of everyday life. Next, I turn to the alternative economic practices and
autonomous forms of social reproduction created by unemployed work-
ers movements to show how these organizations created practices that
privilege the reproduction of material life over the reproduction of capi-
tal. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in vari-
ous intervals between 2005 and 2013 with two different Movimientos de
Trabajadores Desocupados (Unemployed Workers Movements) or MTDs2
in the urban periphery of Buenos Aires. The fieldwork included par-
ticipant observation in many of the movements events and spaces, as
well as semi-structured interviews with organizers and participants in the
unemployed workers movements. I also analyze the organizations writ-
2
While numerous organizations of the unemployed emerged during this period
in Argentina, my focus here is specifically on the so called MTDs: the more
autonomous organizations of the unemployed, which largely remained inde-
pendent from trade unions and political parties, and thus were able to more fully
develop a new form of politics. For more on the histories and trajectories of
different unemployed workers movements and organizations across Argentina,
see Svampa and Pereyra (2009) and Dinerstein (2003).
67
ings and theoretical production, recognizing that self-reflective knowl-

edge production is a fundamental element of this new form of politics
(Casas-Corts, Osterweil, and Powell, 2008; Motta and Esteves, 2014).
Feminization of Resistance
Various authors have noted that recent social movements exhibit a
feminization of resistance, reconfiguring and reimagining the nature,
meaning, and subjects of political resistance and social transformation
(Motta, 2013: 36). This feminization of resistance goes beyond a quan-
titative increase in womens participation and leadership in social move-
ments or the increasing visibility of womens issues to imply a qualita-
tive difference in how resistance takes shape. Among other elements,
the feminization of resistance entails challenging the traditional divisions
between the public and private spheres, politicizing the personal, and
shifting emphasis onto bodies and the everyday activities of social repro-
duction (Fernandes, 2007; Gutirrez Aguilar, 2015; Motta, 2013; Sutton,
2007).
On the one hand, the feminization of resistance is related to the
corresponding feminization of poverty under neoliberalism, in which
the increasing informalization of labor and breakdown of survival strat-
egies for the poor means that the place of popular struggle has shifted
from the formal world of work to the community (Motta, 2013: 36).
Since women are at the heart of the community, they become central
actors in these new forms of popular politics (Ibid.). However, this
feminization of resistance is not only a reaction to the ills of neoliberal-
ism, but is also the result of decades of womens struggles to recognize
domestic labor and other reproductive tasks, to challenge machismo and
discrimination within trade unions and Leftist political parties, and to
defy the hierarchies and sexism inherent within the state institutions.
Women have long sought to include the sphere of personal relationships
in political struggle along with the everyday reproductive labor necessary
to sustain and build a movement, from feeding participants to providing
safeguards against burnout (Federici, 2012; James, 2012). They have also
critiqued the gendered division of labor within movements: how certain
forms of care work are undervalued and assumed to be womens respon-
sibility, while men engage in what is typically considered political work:
68
decision-making, public actions, speaking, etc. (Fernandes, 2007). Thus,

the feminization of resistance should not only be understood as a reac-
tive response to shifts in capital, but also a proactive strategy of women
to push their position to the forefront of anti-capitalist struggles.
Thus, the feminization of resistance becomes an important ele-
ment in how many movements, especially in Latin America, are attempt-
ing to redefine the political. Gutirrez Aguilar alternates between the
terms non-state-centric politics and politics in feminine to describe
this reconfiguration. She argues that non-state-centric politics:
does not propose confrontation with the state as the central issue nor
is it oriented by building strategies for its occupation or takeover;
but rather, basically, it is entrenched in the defense of the common, it
displaces the state and capitals capacities of control, and pluralizes and
expands multiple social capacities of intervention and decision-making
about public affairs: it disperses power as it enables the reappropria-
tion of language and collective decision-making about issues that are
incumbent to all because they affect all of us. (2015: 89)
Gutirrez insists that this is a politics in feminine because
its main axis and heart is the reproduction of material life, the tradi-
tional focus of feminine activity, not exclusive, but crucial and as its
expansive and subversive quality is based in the possibility of including
and articulating human creativity and activity for autonomous ends.
(Ibid.: 8889)
In other words, this new form of politics is defined both by the
rejection of the centrality of the state and a re-centering of issues related
to reproduction, care, and the common.
In this paper, I will explore one specific aspect of the feminization
of resistance: the politicization of social reproduction. Feminist Marx-
ists have long sought to highlight the central role that reproductive labor
plays in the capitalist system by directly producing the commodity labor
power (Dalla Costa and James, 1972).3 Marx discussed social reproduc-
3
For an overview of this debate within Marxian and feminist politics, see Chap-
69
tion as the activities and structures that reproduce the capitalist class
relation from one generation to the next, thus ensuring the reproduction
of capital itself. On the other hand, a feminist perspective defines social
reproduction as the complex of activities and services that reproduce
human beings as well as the commodity labor power, starting with child-
care, housework, sex work and elder care, both in the form of waged
and unwaged labour (Barbagallo and Federici, 2012: 1). These activities
include
household cleaning, shopping, preparing food, doing the laundry, pay-

ing the bills, providing intimacy and emotional support, such as listen-
ing and consoling; bearing children, teaching and disciplining them are
also an important part of reproductive work. We must add the un-
named, unnamable labor required to anticipate, prevent or resolve cri-
ses, keep up good relations with kin and neighbours, coping with the
growing threats to our health through the food we eat, the water we
drink. (Ibid.: 4)
Beyond the tasks that traditionally make up concepts of domestic
work and biological reproduction, this definition includes the affective
labor of creating and maintaining social relations that are at the heart of
capitalist production today (Hardt and Negri, 2009). These are the activi-
ties that allow for the reproduction of human life, of labor power, of the
bios, but also the territory and the community.
Federici compares the Marxian conception of reproduction to the
one developed in feminist struggles:
While the feminist concept of reproduction may appear to be a more

modest category when compared to the Marxian one, the opposite is
true. For Marx, reproduction was the process by which capital accu-
mulates itself. In contrast, feminists conceive of reproduction as the
process that reproduces both the true makers of capitalist accumula-
tion and the struggle against it. (2016: 365)
In other words, reproduction refers to how the capitalist relation is
ter 3 of Kathi Weeks The Problem with Work (2011).
70
reproduced, but also the moment when different social relations can be
produced. In Marxian terms, social reproduction refers to the biologi-
cal reproduction of the labor force as well as the reproduction of the
capitalist social relation. Yet the feminist reading of social reproduction
opens the door for autonomous forms of social reproduction that al-
low the working class to ensure its own material reproduction, as well as
to create non-capitalist social relations. As it is this separation from the
means of their own reproduction that forces the working class to sell
their labor and enter into the capitalist relation, reclaiming control over
social reproduction is a key element of any sustainable anti-capitalist
struggle (Caffentzis, 2010). Furthermore, the devaluing of social repro-
duction is one of the many causes of womens subordinate position in
contemporary capitalist societies (Dalla Costa and James, 1972; Federici,
2004).
Despite its key role, the sphere of social reproduction has often
been ignored both by academics studying labor and social movements
and by labor and political movement leaders (Barbagallo and Federici,
2012; Federici, 2012). However, recently movements around the world
have begun to actively focus on issues related to social reproduction.
Zechner and Rubner Hansen (2016) show how many contemporary
social movements are organizing around reproduction and argue that
struggles around social reproduction are important for building power,
and take place across four levels: at the level of social relations of care,
at the level of spaces and inhabiting, at the level of production and dis-
tribution of resources, and at the level of institutions. They argue:
By building autonomous circuits of self-reproduction, such struggles

ensure the collective power needed to sustain a fight for change. Be-
ing able to temporarily opt out of dominant forms of access to re-
sources be it via labor strikes, road blocks or boycotts generates a
huge increase in collective bargaining and blockading power. These are
powerful antagonistic or agonistic agents vis--vis the state and mar-
ket because, by allowing people to partially withdraw from hegemonic
circuits of self-reproduction, they provide the basis of an actual op-
positional power.
71
Building on this argument, in the remainder of this paper I will

discuss the unemployed workers movements contributions to politiciz-
ing social reproduction, as well as creating autonomous forms of repro-
duction. In doing so, I hope to highlight how the unemployed workers
movements build on past labor movements, but with a significant expan-
sion of the concept of labor to include reproductive labor, which has
allowed them to challenge womens subordination and prevailing gender
relations.
Crisis of Social Reproduction

During the period of neoliberal structural adjustment in the 1990s, wom-
en faced an increased burden as the social safety net provided by the state
was greatly reduced by austerity measures. As the state withdrew from
its role in ensuring social reproduction, cutting spending on health care,
education, unemployment benefits and general aid to the poor, women
were forced to pick up the extra costs in order to protect their families.
Dalla Costa understands neoliberalism in this way as a process which:
Further sacrificed the sphere of reproduction to that of production,

and has therefore underdeveloped reproduction in order to further de-
velop production. This led to the disappearance of individual and col-
lective rights achieved through hard struggle in the preceding decades,
and to the withdrawal of resources available for the pursuit of a life
that would not be all work in a context of increasing precarity and
uncertainty. (2008: 30)
This extra work is added to the generally unwaged and unrec-
ognized labor that women already carried out, especially in peripheral
neighborhoods in which the state often does not provide basic services
(such as running water and sewage). Nagar et al. also note how structural
adjustment disproportionately affects women:
Neoliberal states are subsidized through the informal provision of

housing, food, health care, and education. As neoliberal states with-
draw from the provision of social services, this work is most often
assumed by women in the feminized spheres of household and com-
munity. (2002: 261)
72
In other words, women take on extra work to make up for the

states withdrawal in this role.
The states withdrawal from social reproduction, along with the cri-
sis in formal labor, led to what can be understood as a crisis in social
reproduction. The neoliberal austerity measures of the 1990s were a di-
rect attack on the popular sectors ability to reproduce themselves. Prez
Orozco defines the crisis in social reproduction as the increasing diffi-
culties for putting forth the conditions that make it possible to fulfill the
material, affective, and relational expectations of reproduction (2014:
189). She continues,
These troubles do not attack all of the social body; there are groups
that manage to impose their lives as those that deserve to be rescued
and satisfy their elitist and individualist aspirations. We can characterize
the crisis of social reproduction in terms of three connected processes:
the general increase in vital precarity, the proliferation of situations of
exclusion, and the multiplication of social inequalities to the point of
being able to speak of a process of social hypersegregation. (Ibid.)
Prez Orozco recognizes this crisis of social reproduction as a key
feature of the 2008 financial crisis in Europe, as well as of economic
crises around the world, demonstrating how economic crises particularly
affect women.
In Argentina, this crisis of social reproduction was largely mani-
fested through increasing inflation that caused the prices of utilities and
basic goods to skyrocket. As previously nationalized industries were
privatized and private investors began pulling out of the country due to
currency instability and international market crashes, there was initially
an increase in self-employment and informal sector employment, but as
the economic crisis worsened, those possibilities dried up as well (Gago,
2014), making it increasingly difficult for women to obtain any type of
employment. Along with drastic increases in food prices and utility rates,
the partial privatization of healthcare and education effectively gave rise
to a two-tiered system in which the wealthy used private services, while
the poor were stuck with greatly underfunded public services. Women
especially suffered from these measures since they are usually respon-
73
sible for shopping and cooking food, ensuring that household expenses
and utilities are paid, taking care of children, and coordinating the fam-
ilys healthcare needs.
However, while neoliberalism has particularly affected women, es-
pecially poor and non-white women, these women are not passive victims
in the face of an ever more powerful abstract neoliberal force, but have
proven to be one of the strongest sources of resistance to neoliberalism
(Fernandes, 2007; Motta, 2013; Sutton, 2007). The networks created by
women to feed their families and provide for their basic needs, for ex-
ample through community meals and barter networks, laid the ground-
work for the establishment of unemployed workers movements in ur-
ban areas and were able to effectively meet peoples basic needs, allowing
them to survive the worst times of neoliberalism and crisis (Svampa and
Pereyra, 2009; Zibechi, 2003). Besides the directly productive activities
of women in these networks (starting micro-enterprises in their homes,
for example), they also carried out the essential affective labor of creat-
ing the social relationships based on solidarity that allowed people to
support one another, establishing the basis for the eventual movements
and organizations that would emerge out of their struggles.
Making Social Reproduction Visible

In response to this crisis of social reproduction, the womens first concern
was to take care of their families and communities. Women took the lead
in organizing ollas populares, communal meals where everyone contributed
what they could and ate what they needed. These meals took place in public
spaces, plazas or street corners, bringing the issue of hunger into the public
eye, and sometimes were confrontational, blocking streets or local govern-
ment buildings. Thus, the ollas populares simultaneously served two purposes:
first, they were an immediate and direct solution to the problem of hunger;
second, they served to bring the issue of hunger, and of social reproduction
more generally, into the public sphere. These questions, of putting enough
food on the table, paying bills, making house repairs, and dealing with medi-
cal issues, are usually considered private and personal, the responsibility of each
individual family unit. By cooking and distributing food in public spaces, orga-
nizers challenged this relegation of issues of social reproduction and brought
them into the public discussion, in other words, politicizing social reproduction.
74
The piquetes continued this work of politicizing and making vis-

ible the labor of social reproduction. While most clearly a protest about
unemployment, demanding jobs and/or unemployment subsidies, the
piquetes also served to increase visibility of reproductive labor. Besides
protests, the piquetes were encampments in the middle of the highways,
spaces where people lived out their everyday lives. Thus, the piquetes
were forms of experimentation with collective life: community meals,
health care and medical aid, popular education, varied cultural activities,
and the common production of subjectivity. These commoning prac-
tices were as important as the disruptive element of the protests, by both
encouraging a broader range of participation and allowing the piquetes
to persist by providing people with the material and emotional support
needed to camp out on the road for extended periods of time. Organiz-
ers, many of whom were women, clearly valued this activity and priori-
tized it when coordinating the piquetes. Women were at the forefront
of organizing piquetes and other protests of the unemployed because
their responsibilities of caring were in crisis, and because their ways of
relating to one another and working collectively would sow the seeds
of the solution to the crisis. Women were less likely to be represented
by labor unions, but had developed other less formal ways of support-
ing each other networks for exchanging goods and caring for each
other that greatly impacted the form of organization adopted by the
movements of the unemployed. Meanwhile, many men were left feeling
shocked and uprooted by losing what they had considered to be life-time
employment, upon which they based much of their sense of identity,
friendships, and militancy. Svampa and Pereyra (2009) describe a crisis in
masculinity brought about by cultural shifts but also rising levels of male
unemployment in the 1990s that separated men from the work that was
a crucial element of their identity and social ties. Many unemployed men
were initially unwilling to organize, feeling shame, guilt, and impotency
after losing their jobs (Auyero, 2003). One woman, an early member of
the MTD La Matanza, describes how many responded to being laid off:
The men were embarrassed, they didnt want anyone to know they were
not working, so they would stay inside all day, many started drinking
Meanwhile, us women had to go on providing for our families, we had
75
to eat, we didnt have time to go about being embarrassed or worrying

about our pride thats why we came together and started organizing.
(Interview, November 11, 2011, La Matanza)
This initial organizing was aimed at meeting the basic needs of
participants and other neighborhood residents through collective meals
and other forms of mutual aid and support, recognizing that those needs
would either be met collectively or not at all. It was later that these net-
works of care and support coalesced into unemployed workers organi-
zations in many of the countrys urban areas.
These actions the ollas populares, everyday life in the piquetes,
womens visible role in organizing the unemployed workers movements
served to politicize reproductive labor. First, they made issues of repro-
duction hunger, unaffordable utility rates, inadequate healthcare and
education visible in the public eye and as common problems, not mere-
ly the responsibility of individual families. By carrying out the labor of
social reproduction in public spaces in the middle of piquetes, the MTDs
highlighted the importance of this labor and those who perform it. De-
mands related to obtaining food, lower utility rates, better healthcare and
education, and unemployment benefits put issues regarding reproduc-
tion at the center of the debate around neoliberalism, highlighted the
effect of structural adjustment on women, and posited these issues as
collective social responsibilities, or in other words as political problems.
Womens participation in the ollas populares and piquetes was important
because it was a way for women to break out of the spaces to which
they traditionally had been confined (the household and by extension
the neighborhood) into the public spaces of plazas and highways. As
one young woman who began participating in roadblocks at the age of
sixteen describes,
the piquete was the first place where I experienced where people would
listen to me, where I could be a leader. Before I thought my destiny
would be to clean or cook for other people, I never saw that woman
could take leadership in something that big like the piquetes. (Interview,
Laferre, October 2011)
76
This effort to make struggles around social reproduction visible

was one of the driving forces leading to a change in public policy to
eventually garner more state support for reproductive activities (Garay,
2007). Additionally, using womens traditional activities as political tactics
and carrying them out in public allowed more women to become politi-
cized and actively assume leadership roles within organizations as a form
of subversion, in, against, and beyond the traditional figure of woman
as mother (Fernandes, 2007; Motta, 2013; Sutton, 2007). Their political
actions also have a theoretical force: they challenge the division between
the private and the public, in which activities of social reproduction are
seen as private, both physically taking place in the private sphere of the
home and a private matter to be resolved by the individual or family, in
opposition to public matters, which are automatically considered political
(McDowell, 1999). Additionally, this challenges the relegation of wom-
ens labor as unproductive or secondary.
New Form of Politics

As stated in the opening section, the unemployed workers movements
should be understood within the framework of a new form of politics char-
acterized by the feminization of resistance. Gutirrez Aguilar highlights
how the feminization of politics, focusing on the material reproduction
of everyday life, overturns the very meaning of the political:
The political, currently linked to the reproduction and general expan-

sion of capital and as such always political-economic, is and can be
time and time again defied from the multiple order of the material
reproduction of social life within, against and beyond capital and its repro-
duction (2015: 132).
The movements of the unemployed formed part of a broader wave
of social movements that emerged across Argentina in the late 1990s in
opposition to neoliberal structural adjustment and austerity measures. In
2001, as the country fell even deeper into economic crisis, social unrest
grew throughout the population and ultimately leading to an uprising on
December 19th and 20th that forced the president out of office with the
rallying cry, Que se vayan todos (They all must go), calling for the end
of the neoliberal system and the entire class of politicians supporting it
77
(Barrientos and Isaa, 2011). Yet after the protests, rather than attempting
to take over the state apparatus or to occupy the Casa Rosada, protesters
returned to their neighborhoods where they began building alternatives
in their everyday lives (MTD Solano, 2011). These movements did not
seek representation or to occupy the institutions of government, but
rather were concerned with creating forms of counter-power or popular
power from below.4 This form of politics understands power as relation-
al, as enacted in everyday interactions between people and in forms of
governmentality that expand throughout the social field.5 These move-
ments challenged the traditional forms of organizing practiced by politi-
cal parties, labor unions, and other Leftist movements, which tended to
understand power as residing in bodies of authority and focused exclu-
sively on making demands to those bodies. Instead, they aimed to create
new social relations, subjectivities and forms of life in the present, to
build collective autonomy and control over daily life (Colectivo Situacio-
nes, 2012; MTD de Solano, 2011).
As part of this new form of politics, the piquetero movement
reimagined and reworked their own internal relationships by using as-
semblies and other non-hierarchical forms of decision-making (Sitrin,
2012). That is, piqueteros created decentralized and horizontal forms of
organization and coordination, prioritized direct democracy in their own
practices, and organized themselves in terms of the spaces and rhythms
of everyday life. While internal hierarchies and divisions can often pre-
clude the participation of women, youth, and racial or ethnic minorities,
by promoting horizontal and democratic practices within the organiza-
tions the MTDs created spaces for more diverse participation. Women
and youth were often at the forefront of the organizations of the unem-
ployed, providing a stark contrast with male-dominated labor unions and
4
While other organizations of the unemployed who were affiliated with la-
bor unions or political parties ultimately became incorporated into the Kirch-
ner government, the MTDs remained independent. See the two appendices of
Svampa and Pereyras Entre la ruta y el barrio (2009) for more on the distinctions
between different organizations of the unemployed and their relationship to the
Kirchner government.
5
For more on the different understandings of power of different unemployed
workers organizations, see Colectivo Situaciones (2001) and Mazzeo (2011).
78
Peronist party organizations (Svampa and Pereyra, 2009; Zibechi, 2003).

Again, this form of politics does not see politics as lying elsewhere but as
something that is practiced in the everyday interactions between move-
ment members.
By rejecting traditional forms of representational politics, the
MTDs were not promoting a sort of anti-politics or apolitical organiza-
tion. Rather, they were enacting a form of politics that is not centered
on the institutions of the state, that does not assume that power oper-
ates only from above or that the path to social change lies in occupying
institutions of power a non-state-centric form of politics. This way of
doing politics otherwise must be understood by looking at its effects in
terms of the production of knowledge, meaning, social relations, and
subjectivities. It could also be thought of in terms of micropolitics:
how we reproduce (or dont) the dominant modes of subjectivation
(Guattari and Rolnik, 2005), which does not necessarily mean small scale,
but rather recognizes that capitalism functions at the level of subjectiv-
ity and is reproduced as a social relation. Therefore, the MTD Solano
emphasizes autonomy and horizontality in their project, not as dogmatic
rules but as new forms of relating. As Neka Jara from the MTD elabo-
rates: Autonomy is not an established thing, it is the modification of
certain logics of life, of internal and external relations (MTD Solano,
2011: 196).
This commitment to creating new social relations, which are not
determined by the market or capital-labor relations, permeates all aspects
of the MTDs organization as they take their struggles beyond the work-
place to the spaces of everyday life. Sitrin describes these experiences
as everyday revolutions, referring to the wide range of movements
that emerged around the period of 2001 in Argentina and prioritized
the creation of new social relations in their struggles. She describes this
revolution of the everyday as a combination of horizontality, self-
management, sustenance projects, territorial practices, changing social
relationships, affective politics, self-reflection, and autonomy (2012:
34). This recognition that politics takes place in the space of everyday
activities, and refusing the separation of distinct realms of the social, the
political, and the economic, is key to understanding the MTDs.
79
The political can be found in conflictual production of subjectiv-

ity, new social relations, and forms of life. As already mentioned, these
struggles decenter the institutions of the state in the affirmation of a
non-state-centric form of politics focused on building counter-power
from below. Counter-power refers to a power from below that does not
seek to become an institutionalized, hegemonic or centralized form of
power, but rather to expand the popular capacity for intervention, the
creation and affirmation of new values and forms of life (Colectivo Situ-
aciones, 2001; Colectivo Situaciones and MTD de Solano, 2002). Parallel
to this notion of counter-power is the concept of autonomy, which is
understood not only as independence from the institutions of the state
and capital through the creation of alternative economic practices and
forms of social organization, but also as an ontological autonomy to
determine ones own values and desires. Autonomy thus requires going
beyond the binary logic of the state to develop an autonomous form of
thought and create ones own categories (Colectivo Situaciones, 2009). In
terms of reproduction, autonomy thus refers to the material autonomy
to be able to reproduce ourselves as people in relation to others, but
also as the autonomy to determine how that reproduction takes place
and what value is ascribed to that labor. Thus, this new form of politics
explicitly turns social reproduction into a terrain of struggle, question-
ing what social relations are being reproduced and how, while privileging
the creation of non-capitalist social relations. As will be discussed below,
these non-capitalist social relations are founded on a connection to a
concrete territory, and on communities and relationships based on coop-
eration rather than competition.
Territorial Organizing
This new form of politics and the politicization of social reproduction
requires a shift in the spatiality of politics. Following the moment of
rupture represented by the piquetes and December 2001 protests, many
of the organizations of the unemployed decided to focus their efforts
on organizing in the specific neighborhoods in which their members
lived, creating new social relations, alternative economic practices, and
autonomous forms of social reproduction in those territories (Svampa
and Pereyra, 2009). By deciding to focus primarily on territorial organiz-
80
ing, the MTDs dedicated themselves to directly addressing the needs of

neighborhood residents, without waiting for state intervention, first to
survive the crisis and then to create new, collective ways of life.
This focus on territorial organizing is closely related to transforma-
tions in the spatial organization of labor, as well as the spatiality of re-
productive labor. For people engaged in precarious and informal forms
of labor, work is no longer the primary place of socialization, of build-
ing relations and community, is no longer the privileged site for political
organizing. As one woman participating in the MTD La Matanza ex-
plained:
I work cleaning houses in the Capital, but I work alone, I dont see any-
one there, thats not where I socialize, its when I come back home, to
the neighborhood, thats where my life is, thats why we fight to make
the conditions better there, in the neighborhood, where we live. (Inter-
view, April 23, 2012, La Matanza)
Without a consistently shared site of work, labor organizing cannot
be limited to or centered around the workplace. It was with this in mind,
and looking for new places from which to base their struggles, that the
MTDs began organizing in the specific neighborhoods where members
lived. It is in these neighborhoods where the most important work takes
place: the labor of social reproduction. The MTDs themselves have rec-
ognized this transition with the popular slogan and organizing mantra,
The neighborhood is the new factory (Mazzeo, 2004). This recognizes
not only that production and labor are not limited to the factory, but also
that struggles cannot be confined to the factory.
Thus, territorial organization can be seen as a way of expanding the
struggle to produce new social relations outside the workplace and into
the spaces of everyday life by establishing a physical presence in a given
neighborhood or territory and seeking to collectively manage as many
elements of daily life as possible. Territorial organization as practiced by
the MTDs means organizing around the needs of community residents,
including food, clean water, housing, education, and the desire to form
community in neighborhoods that are socially and ethnically fragmented.
The MTDs attempted to build on what they had won with the piquetes
81
by establishing more permanent spaces such as social centers, clinics and

schools, as well as cooperative productive enterprises, which serve to
house the movements activities and meetings, and more generally as
spaces of encounter, where movement participants can come together
for any or no reason whatsoever. Through these spaces, the MTDs were
able to build a presence and support in their territories, allowing them
to better understand and intervene the most pressing issues to neighbor-
hood residents. This territorial organization implies opening up all the
spaces of daily activity to critique and as possible sites of organization
(Zibechi, 2008). It also points to how these movements recognize and
value the different types of labor that go into producing a territory by
placing an emphasis on practices of care and education. In other words,
the different social relations that these movements strive to create are
embodied in the physical space they inhabit, just as capitalist social rela-
tions are also inscribed in spaces (Lefebvre, 1991).
The territorial work of the organizations of the unemployed is
explicitly linked to the formation of new identities and subjectivities
(Ferrara, 2003). Zibechi argues that a subject cannot exist without terri-
tory, and therefore capital works to deterritorialize. Zibechi locates the
antecedents to the territorialization of the piquetero movement in the
movement of land takeovers and squatter settlements of the 1980s. He
goes further, however, by arguing that it is in the settlements where the
beginnings of an autonomous working class culture is able to develop,
as residents have more control over their spaces: they are not subject to
formal property law or building codes, and thus construct their dwellings
where and how they want to; they name their own streets; and in some
cases residents even have their own forms of governance and justice
(Zibechi, 2003: 164165). This is what the MTDs aim to accomplish,
little by little, as they wrestle control of territory from party politicians,
state officials, and agents of capital in order to create spaces for the poor
and unemployed to create their own forms of life based on solidarity and
cooperation.
Delamata, looking specifically at the experience of the MTD So-
lano, explains the meaning of territorial organizing:
82
Carrying out territorial work in this case, not only means, to strengthen
the collectives work in the local space, but rather, above all, attribute
to the possibility of social change to these community activities. First,
the work in the territory is proposed as the production of new values
of solidarity that reconstitute interpersonal relations and the existential
dimensions of people who have been broken by unemployment, pov-
erty, and the forms of authoritarianism that permeate society in differ-
ent ways. Secondly, this communitarian construction aims to produce a
new society, that does not directly antagonize the places of constituted
power in order to impose itself, but rather it projects itself and affirms
itself as non-state sovereignty. (2004: 48)
Territorial organizing is based on the fundamental recognition that
power lies in the forms of life in the territory and therefore does not at-
tempt to scale-up or privilege larger scale politics as being more effec-
tive forms of achieving social change. Above all, territorial organizing is
based on a commitment to changing social relations in a particular place,
attacking capitalist reproduction at its most fundamental level, and work-
ing to enact new social relations and subjectivities in that place. Thus, this
shift to territorial organizing shows how the feminization of resistance
and the politicization of social reproduction entails a spatial shift in orga-
nizing, opening up spaces that have been traditionally considered private
or womens spaces to political struggle.
Alternative Economic Practices

As Argentinas economic crisis made the failures and limitations of the
neoliberal capitalist system clear, both the need for and potential to cre-
ate alternative economic practices became more apparent. The crisis of
social reproduction discussed above made it necessary for the poor and
unemployed, who could no longer rely on either formal employment or
state support, to invent new forms of support. Many of the alternative
economic practices began as informal practices of solidarity and mutual
aid between neighbors, sharing food or even utilities and housing, in
times of great need, such as the ollas populares previously discussed. These
ad hoc, often spontaneous forms of support and mutual aid became
increasingly organized when the rising rate of unemployment, both in
83
the formal and the informal sector, left more and more people without
access to an income. In many cases, more formal organization was de-
veloped and the activities themselves adopted a more explicitly political
character.
In this sense, these alternative economic practices, which emerged
as survival mechanisms and became increasingly political, can be thought
of as comprising a solidarity economy. Coraggio (2009) defines the solidarity
economy as one that emphasizes use value and meeting the needs of its
participants over exchange value and the accumulation of wealth. Acosta
(2008) similarly emphasizes that the solidarity economy is one that is
not ruled by the market or the state, but rather one in which solidarity is
considered the basic economic value, and the market functions to repro-
duce solidarity, not the other way around. Along with worker-managed
forms of production, the solidarity economy also refers to alternative
forms of exchange and distribution, pricing mechanisms, and property
arrangements (Giarracca and Massuh, 2008). This is similar to the eco-
feminist approach taken by Prez Orozco that argues for economies that
put sustaining life both human and non-human at their center, rather
than the reproduction of markets. These different ways of theorizing the
solidarity economy ultimately point to the creation of practices that put
the reproduction of life over the reproduction of capital, thus making
reproduction a crucial terrain of struggle.
The MTD Solano makes a similar argument, defining its vision of
an alternative economy as one that creates common and communitarian
forms of life, in which meeting participants basic needs comes before
the question of how much profit different enterprises generate (Colec-
tivo Situaciones and MTD de Solano, 2002). In other words, the MTDs
objectives are not merely to autonomously produce economic wealth,
but also to challenge notions of value that place individual economic
wealth over collective economic and social well-being.
Toward this end, many of the unemployed workers movements
started their own worker-managed or cooperative enterprises. Along
with providing some amount of income to movement members, co-
operatives also aimed to create ways of working otherwise, to provide
work with dignity. The self-managed productive enterprises are usually
84
organized as cooperatives, where workers or the organization as a whole

collectively own the means of production, emphasizing workplace de-
mocracy, non-hierarchical forms of internal organization, and the just
distribution of surplus. All decisions regarding production, distribution,
pay, and internal organization are taken collectively by workers in assem-
blies. This does require that more of workers time and energy goes into
administration and management, but it also means that those decisions
become politicized. Additionally, this challenges the division between
intellectual and manual labor, as does rotating specific tasks (Matonte,
2010). Rotating tasks helps ensure that hierarchies do not develop within
the enterprise, even informal hierarchies based on skills and knowledges.
For this reason, the cooperatives also tend to emphasize internal skills
training and knowledge-sharing about all aspects of the enterprise, as
well as the politics of worker self-management and cooperativism.
According to Flores of the MTD La Matanza, cooperation not
only represented an economic response to the needs of life, but was
also the organizational form that we found to break with isolation and
to counteract the politics of neoliberal individualism predominant in our
society (2005: 36). He discusses how self-management and cooperativ-
ism allow the movement to resolve issues of daily life by providing for
basic needs, but also, and more importantly, they help the movement
strengthen its organization to be able to more effectively confront capi-
tal. Flores continues, for us, since then, [cooperativism] became a form
of life (Ibid.). He sees cooperativism and self-management as spaces
for the construction of a double power where the transitional work of
workers control takes place (Ibid.). The MTDs interest in cooperativ-
ism was not without critiques, however. Flores criticizes what he refers
to as business cooperatives for being organized too much like capitalist
businesses and becoming another way of appropriating workers efforts.
Therefore, before starting their cooperatives MTD members studied co-
operativism, especially focusing on the experiences in the Zapatista ter-
ritories in Chiapas and the landless movements in Brazil (Ibid.: 35). The
fundamental element of these cooperatives, according to Flores, was that
they were built as tools for the social movement, and, therefore, had a
qualitatively different character (Ibid.).
85
These educational experiences served as the basis from which the

MTD La Matanza was able to begin their own cooperative project. They
started their first cooperative soon after occupying an abandoned school
premise in the neighborhood of La Juanita, a small textile workshop.
Various group members were already doing sewing work out of their
homes using their own machines. On top of these machines they al-
ready owned, the MTD was able to purchase more sewing machines and
equipment from a small grant from the Swiss Embassy. The cooperative
initially employed six women, members of the MTD who were without
work and had prior sewing/textile-work experience. The MTD also op-
erates a cooperative bakery based on the same model. Originally paying
all workers an equal salary, the cooperatives assembly later decided to
take other factors into account, such as seniority and need, in deter-
mining pay rates as the cooperative grew to incorporate more workers.
The important thing, workers expressed, is that these decisions are made
openly, in assemblies, where all the workers are able to express their con-
cerns and opinions, and they come to agreement over the final decision.
Therefore, rather than a way of controlling and exploiting workers, the
wage becomes a form of ensuring the communitys continued reproduc-
tion.
One of the textile cooperatives most successful projects has been
its ongoing collaboration with fashion designer Martn Churba. Describ-
ing his relationship with the MTD, Churba states, I cant even say that
Im giving them work, Im giving them a space where they develop their
own capacities (2007: 237). In their largest collaboration, the MTDs
cooperative produced 1,500 fashion guardapolvos (the white coat tradi-
tionally worn as a school uniform), which were mostly exported. Rather
than Churba making the designs on his own while the MTDs workers
carried out the manual labor, the entire production process was collab-
orative. Movement members participated in the guardapolvo design, with
Churba and his employees taking the time to work with the MTD not
only to train workers in the cooperative but also to incorporate their
ideas into the production. The project was immensely successful: it cre-
ated decently paid employment for a number of MTD members, it gen-
erated a profit for the cooperative, which was used to expand the sewing
workshop and support the MTDs other activities, and visibility from the
86
project helped the MTD build connections for other projects. Following
the guardapolvo project, the MTDs cooperative made uniforms for other
companies, including a few recuperated factories, as well as bags and t-
shirts for other social organizations.
Perhaps more important than the material production that takes
place in these cooperatives is the production of new social relations and
subjectivities as workers learn to collectively manage their own activi-
ties without relying on an external authority and overcoming feelings
of guilt and unworthiness from being unemployed (Flores, 2005). The
MTD La Matanza discusses their cooperatives as not only an alterna-
tive method of organizing the economy, but also of organizing society,
thus refusing to accept the separation of the economic from the social.
The goal of cooperativism is to try to construct through the basis of
cooperation another culture, another subjectivity, other social relations,
really another society (Ibid.: 100). Thus, within the politicization of so-
cial reproduction, these cooperative enterprises play an important role
on at least two levels: first, they provide some sort of income enabling
the material reproduction of the unemployed, and second, they are part
of a process of the creation of new (horizontal, non-capitalist) social
relations. Additionally, by making decisions in assemblies and rotating
tasks, the cooperatives challenge traditional gendered divisions of labor
wherein women are relegated to more menial tasks on the lower end
of hierarchies. Assemblies do not merely overturn traditional workplace
hierarchies, for example, allowing women to be bosses, but seek to abol-
ish those hierarchies altogether, creating a format in which all workers
participate equally and fully in decision-making and are not managed or
controlled by others.
Autonomous Social Reproduction

The MTDs decision to return to the neighborhood and focus on ter-
ritorial organizing fundamentally involved the creation of new ways of
organizing and sustaining daily life through autonomous forms of social
reproduction. This serves two purposes: to enable the poor and unem-
ployed, those excluded from waged labor, to survive, and to create the
material foundation of a counter-power from below. Rather than merely
taking over what should be state responsibilities and thus serving as an
87
apology for the neoliberal state as some critics have argued, these au-
tonomous projects recognize that it is in these actions of social repro-
duction that relations of dominance are produced and where they can
be challenged. While there are many facets of social reproduction, here
I will focus on concrete examples from the MTD La Matanza, as well
as the MTD Solano. These brief descriptive accounts will shed light on
what it means to focus on reproduction in practice, and the important
impacts of these projects for participants.
MTD La Matanza: Education and Childcare

A focus on study and education at all ages and levels has been a key com-
ponent of the MTD La Matanzas political activity since the early days of
the organization. This emphasis came after the difficulties of self-man-
agement and in sustaining an autonomous movement in general demon-
strated that capitalist values were much more deeply ingrained than they
had previously imagined (Flores, 2005). Thus, focusing on education was
seen as a way to directly create new values, to challenge masculinist and
capitalist ways of knowing, and to create new relationships between all
participants in the education experience (Motta and Esteves, 2014).
When the MTD La Matanza formed in 1996, one of their first
activities was a reading group to study the economic and political trans-
formations underway in Argentina, starting with readings that allowed
them to understand the structural causes behind the increase in unem-
ployment. Understanding unemployment as a structural issue was a key
moment in helping them to politicize their own situation, rather than
remaining trapped in the neoliberal ideology that only recognizes indi-
vidual responsibility for unemployment. Later the movement worked
with a group of social psychology students based at the University of
La Matanza to investigate more of these subjective effects of unemploy-
ment and the ways in which that neoliberal ideology becomes internal-
ized. This investigation led the MTD to recognize guilt as a key element
of neoliberal ideology, which must be overcome in order to effectively
organize the unemployed (Flores, 2005). Following this research on the
role of guilt, the MTD continued doing workshops with social psychol-
ogy students on how to counteract this guilt and build new relationships
based on solidarity. These workshops and experiences of collective in-
88
vestigation around guilt were part of an essential process of building the

relationships that would allow the movement to grow and workers to
cooperatively self-manage the textile workshop and bakery.
Soon after occupying the abandoned school building where the co-
operatives are also located, the MTD La Matanza officially inaugurated
the building as the Center for Education and Formation of Communi-
tarian Culture (Centro de Educacin y Formacion de Cultura Comunitaria, CE-
FOCC). They sought to use the space to provide educational activities
to children and adults in the neighborhood, as well as for more formal
political formation exercises as part of the political project of con-
structing the movement. Here education was not considered a neutral,
objective good, an object to be handed down from those who know to
those who do not, but rather as a political tool for the creation of new
values and subjectivities. Therefore, they emphasize the construction
of communitarian culture in all of their educational practices, using
an assembly-based model that values different voices and experiences,
understanding that new knowledges and relations are formed precisely
through the interaction of differences in the process of discussion and
learning.
Early childhood education quickly became one of the MTD La
Matanzas main priorities after they realized that cooperative values need
to be instilled from a young age. In 2004, they opened the preschool
CIEL (Crecer Imaginando en Libertad Grow up Imagining Freedom) in
their premises. The preschool is made up of two classrooms, divided
by age, and employs two trained preschool teachers. It also relies on a
large number of outside volunteers, often education students from the
nearby University of La Matanza or international volunteers, and is sup-
ported financially by the MTDs other productive enterprises and dona-
tions from local and international NGOs. The preschools stated goal
is to start fomenting values of mutual aid, care, and solidarity from an
early age. Classes start each day with a check-in, giving children a chance
to speak about issues in their lives, and throughout the day cooperative
games and activities are emphasized, providing an alternative to the of-
ten violent and competitive norms common in the neighborhood. Thus,
students learn different ways of relating to one another and to adults, as
well as the skills necessary to continue fighting for their rights as they
grow older.
89
The MTD La Matanza also started an adult literacy program, which

evolved into a popular high school, that later split into a separate organi-
zation due to political differences. The school expanded to offer a com-
plete primary school education for adults and, in 2010, a high school for
adults. Many of the students are migrants from rural areas of Argentina
and neighboring countries, mostly women, who had few opportunities
for formal education in their youth. Besides teaching the government-
mandated courses, the school teaches classes about health and nutrition,
as well as political formation, reading influential Latin American Marx-
ists and learning about the revolutionary history of Argentina. These
readings and discussions serve to politicize neighborhood residents, en-
couraging them to take action to improve their own quality of life. The
principle teachers are paid by the government for their work, while other
volunteers count the time they spend in the school as their weekly
work requirement to receive unemployment benefits.
The MTD also makes an effort to provide childcare or create child-
friendly spaces at all of its events. On the one hand, providing childcare
allows women, who are normally the primary caregivers for children,
to participate in other activities, be they political or some sort of em-
ployment. It makes taking care of the children a collective, community
responsibility, not the sole responsibility of mothers or other female rela-
tives, and enables women to be more equal participants in the movement
as a whole. On the other hand, by paying members to work in childcare
and educational projects, either directly or through government subsi-
dies, the MTD demonstrates the importance it places on these activities.
Valuing and compensating this labor thus directly contrasts against its
invisibilization and naturalization as womens labor under capitalism, and
allows for the work to be shared rather than falling solely to women.
MTD Solano: Housing and Health

The MTD de Solano formed in the mid 1990s in the southern region
of Greater Buenos Aires as a group of unemployed women and men
occupied a church and began to discuss their common problems. Like
the MTD La Matanza, they first focused their energy on organizing road-
blocks, as well as directly protesting at supermarkets demanding food.
90
After the 2002 murders of Dario Santilln and Maximiliano Kosteki,6

the MTD Solano decided to reorient its energies towards the neighbor-
hood where most of its members lived. There they started working to
address the most immediate needs of neighborhood residents access
to food, housing, and healthcare as well as the generalized feeling of a
lack of trust and solidarity in their communities (Colectivo Situaciones
and MTD Solano, 2002).
One of the MTD Solanos primary areas of intervention has been
on issues related to housing and land access. They understand housing
as more than a physical roof over ones head, but also as the stability and
self-determination of a home and the basis for the construction of new
social relations and community. In 2005, members of the MTD Solano
participated in the takeover and settlement of a neighborhood in the
municipality of Florencio Varela. According to one participant, we were
thirty to forty families that wanted to have the experience of living and
constructing in community. The houses were built collectively among all
of us, we even made the [concrete] blocks that we used to build these
houses (Interview, September 8, 2012). She describes the situation lead-
ing up to the initial takeover:
After participation in various land takeovers in the southern region of

Greater Buenos Aires (in Quilmes, Solano, Varela) since the 1990s with
very intense movements of organization and community struggle, we
started to think about what would happen if we won the land. In gen-
eral, very different logics were imposed than those that some of us
wanted for ourselves. Many times they went through moments of com-
munity, organization, assembly and collective logics to other moments
where a more individual logic reigned. After the events of Puente
Pueyrredn the need to construct a communitarian space emerged,
the desire to project a life with our friends. (Ibid.)
This settlement was the MTD Solanos main basis of operation for
many years, from which they organized other neighborhood residents
6
On June 26, 2002, two piqueteros from the Coordinadora de Trabajadores
Desocupados Anbal Vern, of which the MTD Solano then formed a part,
were shot and killed by police in a piquete on Puente Pueyrredn.
91
around issues relating to everyday life in the neighborhood, including

creating a large community garden and a number of cultural and educa-
tional activities.
Nearly seven years later, the MTD was forced out of that neigh-
borhood due to increased violence from local drug dealers seeking to
expand into their territory. They decided to build a new housing collec-
tive in another part of the urban periphery. Members build the hous-
es themselves, following the principle of the minga, or collective work
sessions, originating in campesino and indigenous communities. These
mingas are an informal sort of contract or work agreement between par-
ticipants: everyone helps one family build their house this month, and a
few months later everyone pitches in to help another family. In this way,
the mingas constitute a rotating form of collaborative work and mutual
aid, creating long-lasting relationships and bonds of solidarity and com-
munity between participants.
The houses are built according to environmental principles that
make them more energy-efficient, such as the green or living roofs cov-
ered in vegetation in order to better insulate the building. Much of this
construction expertise comes from visits and workshops with environ-
mental activists and indigenous communities. Additionally, as an orga-
nization of unemployed/precarious/informal workers, the MTD mem-
bers have varied experiences in the construction industry, as well as odd
jobs involving carpentry or electrical wiring. This mixture of different
skills and experiences, one of the outcomes of the heterogeneity of the
composition of the unemployed, here proves a crucial asset in building
a new community. Collective work also produces the feeling that these
are all common projects in which everyone is invested, and materially
produces new social relations and ties of solidarity between participants.
The minga points to a different way of organizing labor in general, in a
non-alienated and dignified way. In other words, it is not only the houses
themselves, nor even the physical community of the collective houses,
that are the outcome of political struggle, but also how the houses are
built, the social relations and subjectivities created in the process, and
those that persist in the newly created space.
The MTD Solano also operates a health clinic located in anoth-
er neighborhood of the urban periphery. On the one hand, this clinic
92
provides important services for neighborhood residents who otherwise

would not have access to them. The clinic relies on doctors and other
healthcare practitioners who are willing to donate their time to serving
low-income communities, as well as donations and government subsidies
for some medical supplies. Many movement members have training in
psychology or other health services and dedicate much of their time to
working in the clinic. (This is in part due to the rich network of alterna-
tive education institutions, such as the Universidad Popular de Madres de
Plaza de Mayo, which allows for activists to study these topics for free
and with a social justice focus.) Besides providing these much-needed
services, the clinic also seeks to create alternative notions of health and
care. Recognizing how capitalist values have deeply affected the medical
industry in terms of prioritizing the profits of the pharmaceutical indus-
try over the well-being of people, the clinic aims to promote a notion
of health based on collective well-being rather than the distribution of
drugs and diagnoses of illnesses. Many of the clinics services focus on
mental health, especially problems related to substance abuse and addic-
tion. However, rather than reinforcing the mainstream medical approach
that treats these as psychiatric illnesses, clinic workers adopt an approach
that treats these problems in a more holistic manner: for individuals to
receive treatment, their family members (defined broadly meaning at
least one family member or close friend) must also participate in sepa-
rate sessions, in an attempt to address underlying causes of the issue and
create a more healthy and supportive community for the afflicted person.
Health care practitioners work in pairs, usually a medical doctor paired
with a social psychologist, to treat patients. They also participate in vari-
ous alternative health networks, such as a local womens health group and
other groups working around indigenous ideas of health and well-being
(Interview with Neka Jara and Alberto Spagnolo, February 18, 2013).
Thus, through organizing around housing and health care, as well
as food production in their community garden, the MTD Solano di-
rectly intervenes in issues of reproduction. These interventions allow its
members to sustain themselves, while also creating different social rela-
tions that challenge the reproduction of capitalist relations. Members of
the MTD consistently speak of care as one of their fundamental values
and the cornerstone of their project: care for each other as members
93
of a movement, as well as care for the environment and community

in a broader sense. This emphasis on care permeates all of their activi-
ties: from literally taking care of each in the clinic and collectively caring
for children to taking care to equally share labor and decision-making
responsibilities within the organization. Speaking of care implies a way
of engaging differently in reproduction by prioritizing the creation and
reproduction of life and healthy social relations over the reproduction
of capital. This emphasis on the ethics of care is an important thread
running through the feminization of politics at different scales and in
different places, pointing to a way of carrying out social reproduction
otherwise (Gutirrez Aguilar, 2015; Motta, 2013; Zechner and Rubner
Hansen, 2016).
Conclusion
This analysis of the unemployed workers movements from the per-
spective of reproductive labor has shown that the unemployed workers
movements emerged as a response to a crisis of social reproduction, that
they successfully made that reproductive labor visible, politicized it, and
in some cases were able to provide remuneration for it, and that their
projects were aimed at creating autonomous forms of social reproduc-
tion in specific territories. These movements point to a new spatiality
of political struggle: rather than being centered around the spaces and
institutions of the state, the unemployed workers movements organized
territorially, in the spaces of everyday life in which social reproduction oc-
curs. Organizing around the spaces where people live and issues of social
reproduction has allowed the MTDs to focus on what people have in
common, despite the heterogeneous composition and social fragmenta-
tion of the unemployed.
This focus on reproduction and the spaces of everyday life can be
understood in a broader framework of the feminization of resistance, re-
ferring not only to the increased visible participation of women in move-
ments, but also to profound changes to how resistance is carried out.
This new form of politics emphasizes internal dynamics and democratic
decision-making processes, as well as a focus on the everyday practicali-
ties of how members reproduce themselves, rather than privileging an
abstract and state-centered politics. This means challenging machismo
94
and patriarchal forms of dominance within movements, as well as gen-

dered divisions of labor that often consider issues of reproduction to
be secondary or naturally womens work. By organizing explicitly around
issues of reproduction, the MTDs demonstrate the importance of this
work and those who carry it out.
Focusing on reproduction also allows for rethinking not only what
counts as labor but what labor is valuable and necessary work. Reproduc-
tion opens an interesting question because it is the reproduction of capi-
tal but also of ourselves. If it is in these activities of reproduction that
we reproduce the capitalist relation, then it is also where we can start to
build something new. As Federici states, addressing the political potential
of organizing around reproduction:
For nothing so effectively stifles our lives as the transformation into

work of the activities and relations that satisfy our desires. By the same
token, it is through the day-to-day activities by means of which we pro-
duce our existence, that we can develop our capacity to cooperate and
not only resist our dehumanization but learn to reconstruct the world
as a space of nurturing, creativity, and care. (2012: 12)
Reproduction is thus the central point of conflict: where capitalist
relations can be reproduced or not, either as the basis of exploitation or
the seeds of new social relations and ways of living together.
Recent events continue to indicate that social reproduction is at
the crux of contemporary struggles: struggles over life and death for
the poor and unemployed, but also attempts by capital and the state to
expand their control over ever more areas of life by attempting to cap-
ture and capitalize on reproductive labor. However, women continue to
lead the resistance to processes of neoliberalism and the precaritization
wrought by this crisis of reproduction, through the creation of autono-
mous forms of social reproduction and the promotion of an ethics of
care that challenges the basic assumptions of capitalist development.
95
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99
Decolonizing Australias Body Politics:

Contesting the Coloniality of
Violence of Child Removal
Sara C. Motta
The University of Newcastle, Australia
Abstract
In this article I develop a critique of the continual historic and contemporary use
of child removal to systematically pathologize and criminalize Black, Indigenous,
and poor-white motherhood. I demonstrate how the technologies and rationalities
put to work as part of the reproduction of the modern state, wound the body poli-
tic in ways that disarticulate the conditions of possibility of the political subjectiv-
ity of the subaltern. I develop my critique as a re-reading of contemporary child
removal in Australia through a decolonizing feminist perspective. Accordingly,
I begin by demonstrating how the biopolitical attempt to produce the raced and
gendered subject as a non-subject denied rights and rationality is co-constitutive of
the foundations and continuing reproduction of settler-colonial societies, including
that of the Australian state and polity, in the neoliberal period. However, I do
not stop at this point, for this is to re-inscribe the subaltern in the logics of denial
of subjectivity of coloniality. Thus in the second part of the article, emerging from
activist scholarship with the Family Inclusion Strategy Hunter, Hunter Valley,
NSW Australia an organization comprised of families who have or are ex-
periencing child removal, practitioners working in the out-of-home care and child
protection sectors, and critical scholars that are united in their commitment to fore-
ground the voices, knowledges, and perspectives of birth families in the practices,
policies, and politics of child removal I offer a critique through praxis of these
dehumanizing state practices. I focus on three areas: Decolonizing Monologues of
Intervention through Dialogues of Connection; Co-construction of Knowledges
for Transformation; and Encounters across Borders: Embodying and Embed-
ding Critical Reflexivity. My engagement foregrounds how these active processes
of subjectivity of racialized subaltern mothers and families, and their allies offer
emergent possibilities for a decolonizing politics which seeks not recognition within
the state of things as they are but a radical disruption of the terms of the con-
100
SARA C. MOTTA DECOLONIZING AUSTRALIAS BODY POLITICS:
versation as they have and continue to structure Australias state and polity. This
praxical analysis and reflection contributes and extends our conceptualization of
the feminization of resistance by bringing to the centre of our analytic and politi-
cal attention the decolonizing epistemological and methodological aspects of this
reinvention of emancipatory politics.
Legacies and Logics of Coloniality

Settler-Colonial societies are characterized by a history in which their In-
digenous First Peoples were treated as non-subjects through rationalities
and logics of elimination either through direct physical annihilation or
processes of cultural, psychological, and subjective assimilation (Maldo-
nado-Torres, 2007). It is the latter logic and rationality and how this is
reproduced in the contemporary neoliberal period that is the subject of
critique here. Of particular ethical and political importance is maintain-
ing in productive tension and analytic visibility both how such strategies
work to reproduce the non-subjectivity of the racialized subaltern wom-
en and undercut the possibility of emergence of her political subjectivity,
and, how they are resisted through processes of active subjectivity and
onto-epistemological practices of (re)humanization.
Strategies of child removal to remove the Indian from the man
characterize the interventions of assimilationist politics in Australia,
Canada, United States, and New Zealand. Historical archives and critical
analysis demonstrate how such strategies were premised upon the denial
of the humanness and subjectivity of Indigenous peoples, and in the
case of the US its Afro-American population, and a lack of recognition
that there was anything to be learned from Indigenous and Black culture
and ways of life. As an Inquiry into assimilationist policies in Australia
between the 1920s and 1970s concluded the predominant aim of Indig-
enous child removals was the absorption or assimilation of the children
in to the wider, non-Indigenous community so that their unique cultural
values and ethnic identities would disappear (Krieken, 2004: 141). Ab-
originality was constructed as a primitive uncivilized social order lacking
historical agency and knowledge as against the white settler society which
was represented as synonymous with civilization, progress, and reason
(Morgensen, 2011).
101
When we bring the gendered subject into our considerations, then

the interrelationships of paternalism and patriarchy become evident in
the formation of settler-colonial states and polity. Aboriginal, and Black
mothers in the States, were represented as children of the state lack-
ing rationality, reason, and knowledge and also as Salmon (2011: 169)
describes in the Canadian case but representative of more generic discur-
sive positioning as abusive, neglectful and otherwise dangerous to their
children. Racialized subaltern mothers were therefore interpolated as
non-citizens through infantilization and pathologization which left them
subject to the interventions of the state onto their bodies, and into their
families and communities (Jacobs, 2009). In the Australian context this
resulted in the genocidal policies now referred to as the Stolen Genera-
tion (Krieken, 2004; Robinson and Paten, 2008). At once therefore was
a paradoxical process of both denial and invisibilization as knowing sub-
jects with history, culture, and agency, at the same time as a process of
being made hyper-visible through representations that sought to caste
these women and their families as legitimately subject to civilizing state
interventions. As Sara Ahmed so eloquently describes in the Phenom-
enology of Whiteness,
When we talk about a sea of whiteness or white space we are talk-

ing about the repetition of the passing by of some bodies and not oth-
ers, for sure. But non-white bodies do inhabit white spaces; we know
this. Such bodies are made invisible when we see spaces as being white, at the same
time as they become hyper-visible when they do not pass, which means they stand
out and stand apart. (2007: 156, author emphasis)
Whilst it is essential to re-tell this story of the violences of the
settler-colonial past it is important that we do not stop here as this can
fall prey to a re-presentation of Indigenous and Black communities and
mothers as passive spectators on their lives and merely victimized re-
cipients of state policies. This can reinforce a narrative which as Maria
Lugones (2010: 748) describes [assumes that] the global capitalist co-
lonial system is in every way successful in its destruction of peoples,
knowledges, relations and economies.
As archival evidence suggests strategies of child removal were de-
veloped as a way of quelling potential threats to order (both social and
102
political), as a biopolitical process of disciplining and controlling the au-

tonomous female subject and collective forms of social reproduction,
and as a means of breaking Aboriginal and Afro-American resistance
(Roberts, 2007, 2012; Salmon, 2011; Robinson and Paten, 2008). This
foregrounds how oppressed and colonized communities resisted such
practices of assimilation, denial, and annihilation. Affirming Lugones
reminder that the racialized subaltern woman
[is] a being who begins to inhabit a fractured locus constructed doubly,

who perceives doubly, where the sides of the locus are in tension, and
the conflict itself actively informs the subjectivity of the colonized self
in multiple relation (2010: 748).
Neoliberal Smoke and Mirrors

Such processes of dehumanization and de-subjectification of Black and
Indigenous subaltern mothers have continued into the neoliberal era de-
spite both the formal recognition of citizenship status of Indigenous
peoples and official apologies for systematic strategies of child remov-
al in Settler Colonial States such as Australia and Canada.
Neoliberal social interventions are justified through a discourse
that individualizes social ills. Thus social ills such as poverty, domestic
violence, addiction, unemployment, and mental health become the re-
sponsibility of poor individuals defects, pathologies, and deficits (Mot-
ta, 2008; Mansell and Motta, 2013). This discourse responsibilizes poor
communities for the destructive impacts of neoliberal reform and makes
them accountable to the state for their actions and behaviors at the same
time as state run social services and support systems are privatized, out-
sourced, and downsized in the name of growth and efficiency. Institu-
tionally this is manifested in the increasing turn to audit and risk cultures
and practices, which create rituals of verification (Power, 1997 cited
in Scherz, 2011: 35) that transform a political question into a technical
issue by recasting it in the neutral language of science (Dreyfus and
Rainbow, 1983: 196, cited in Scherz 2011: 35).
The intersecting paradox that faces poor mothers, often amongst
the most adversely hit by these reforms and (mis)representations is to be
103
caught between the state strategies of privacy and punishment represent-

ed as expert and objective strategies of attentiveness and care. Yet the
privatization and individualization of social reproduction hurts mothers.
Firstly, it results in women from the poorest communities with the fewest
resources coming to shoulder the greatest burdens of ensuring the well-
being of their children. Secondly, as they are re-presented as responsible
for their and their childrens social and economic conditions they are
easily pathologized as unfit mothers subject to state intervention, sur-
veillance, and punishment (Roberts, 2009; Salmon, 2011). In this context
welfare systems reproduce strategies of subjectification which seek to
regulate the behaviors of poor mothers so as to reproduce their political
and social disarticulation (Roberts, 2007; Mansell and Motta, 2013).
The disciplinary neoliberal states intersecting strategies of privatiz-
ing of social reproduction and pathologizing of poor mothers imbricates
smoothly with the historic racist discourses which represent Black and
Indigenous mothers as unfit for rule and citizenship and thus legitimately
subject to state paternalistic and patriarchal interventions. They build on
and reinforce misrepresentations that pathologize Black and Indigenous
motherhood which portray black women as sexually licentious the
family-demolishing Matriarch, the devious welfare queen, the depraved
crack addict accompanied by her equally monstrous crack baby- paint
[ing] a picture of a dangerous motherhood that must be regulated and
punished (Roberts, 2012: 1292).
Research into contemporary forms of biopolitical punishment and
regulation of racialized and feminized subjects in settler colonial states
demonstrates that numerous iterations of social policy related to child
protection and community cohesion and framed as practices of care
and commitment reproduce discourses of dehumanization and episte-
mological negation. These discourses represent, in the Canadian case,
Aboriginal mothers and their children as objects for state intervention
that are unable and unwilling to care for their children (Salmon, 2011:
170), and in the US, they represent Black mothers as incapable of gov-
erning themselves and need(ing) state supervision which helps to justify
intense state surveillance and intervention into black communities and
families (Roberts, 2007: 34). In this way Aboriginal and Black mothers
become positioned as outside of the circuits of productive citizenship
104
and as against the needs and interests of the public. Arguably, this justi-
fies the states intervention into their lives in ways which re-traumatize
and seek to ensure order and acquiescence that help[s] contain resis-
tance against the states support of systematic inequalities and collusion
with corporate interests (Roberts, 2009: 194).
The net of disciplinary biopolitical regulation and fragmentation
of the body politic is widening as the possibilities of inclusion into
neoliberal regimes of accumulation decreases (Chant, 2007; Morgensen,
2009). Thus the poor white mother becomes increasingly represented
as a racialized non-subject, legitimately subject to similar practices of
blaming, shaming and disciplinary interventions. As Sara Ahmed (2007:
159160) explains:
Some bodies, even those that pass as white, might still be out of line
with the institutions they inhabit. After all, institutions are meeting
points, but they are also where different lines intersect, where lines
cross with other lines, to create and divide spaces Becoming white
as an institutional line is closely related to the vertical promise of class
mobility: you can move up only by approximating the habitus of the
white bourgeois body.
As these examples foreground the consequences of disproportion-
ate practices of child removal from subaltern Black and Indigenous com-
munities in settler-colonial societies work to inflict further individual and
collective soul wounds (for a detailed discussion of this concept see the
work of Duran et al., 2008) on communities who have already suffered
centuries of wounding and enact fresh wounds on communities suffer-
ing the traumatic impacts of changes in patterns of accumulation which
result in mass and chronic unemployment and social exclusion. This is a
politics of state shaming, blaming, and abuse which does not honor
women [as it] decrees simultaneously that these women must be and yet
cannot be normative mothers (Fraser, 1989: 153 in Salmon, 2011: 173;
for a detailed analysis of how feminist discourses have been co-opted
into these biopolitical logics see Bumiller, 2008). A poor racialized and
feminized underclass becomes re-presented as less-than-citizen and their
needs [positioned] as against those of the public (Salmon, 2011: 173).
This justifies policies and practices of intervention that build upon and
105
extend historic strategies of dehumanization that aim to produce the

raced and gendered subject as a non-subject and disarticulate the condi-
tions of possibility for their political subjectivity. This demonstrates the
historic and contemporary co-constitutive role of such practices of de-
humanization to settler-colonial states and democratic polities.
Representational Absence of the Racialized

Subaltern Mother
Critical political economy analysis of contemporary processes of
neoliberal dispossession have paid scant attention to how these state dis-
ciplinary technologies and strategies impact on the gendered and racial-
ized body of the proletariat (sf. Hardt and Negri, 2005; Harvey, 2007;
iek, 1998). This reproduces the invisibilization of Black and Indig-
enous motherhood as a site of oppression and resistance despite these
women often being at the forefront of the attacks of neoliberalism of
social, economic, and political rights and making up a large proportion
of many of the movements resisting such politics in the Global South
(Motta, 2013, 2014; Gutierrez, 2012). If the Black woman and mother
is re-presented, she is as Lugones (2006: 78) describes not within the
bounds of normalcy (that is without structural description) as infe-
rior. Such a representational absence reinforces a patriarchal logic of
coloniality in the production of critical theory which re-enacts the
very processes of denial and elision it seemingly seeks to contest (Motta,
2016).
On the other hand, feminist materialist analysis has contributed
to visibilizing the gendered impacts of contemporary neoliberalism on
the body of the global proletariat. Thinkers such as Sylvia Chant (2008)
have demonstrated how processes of dispossession have eroded the sur-
vival mechanisms of poor communities and augmented the burden that
women carry for ensuring the welfare and social reproduction of their
children and families. This increased burden of social reproduction is
combined with the entrance of poor women into the workforce often
in unregulated and casualized conditions. Such a combination of struc-
tural shifts has resulted in the feminization of poverty with increasingly
precarious and violent conditions of everyday life contextualizing the
106
experiences of millions of women and their families across the Globe.

Nuanced analyses (sf. Olivera, 2006) have demonstrated the intimate
link between these processes of structural reform and the increase in
intimate partner violence and femicide as communities are ripped apart,
social identities devalued, and cultural practices and autonomous moral
economies eroded. However, there is again little work in relation to gen-
dered state strategies of dehumanization, denial, and disarticulation in
relation to welfare, child protection, and prison systems. Additionally,
whilst these analyses visibilize conditions of gendered, classed, and ra-
cialized oppression, they reproduce the racialized subaltern women as
victim, re-presenting her silence and reinforcing a discursive representa-
tion which elides her subjectivity (sf. for a similar critique Mohanty, 1988,
2003).
More specific critical analysis of state welfare and prison systems
have demonstrated how the prison industrial complex in the US is an
instrument for the management of social and racialized marginality (see
for example Chartand, 2016; Waquant, 2002). However, these accounts
neglect the gendered intersections of power and oppression and so ne-
glect incarcerated women. Yet as Roberts (2012: 1483) demonstrates In-
carcerations impact on black mothers is an important element of how
mass incarceration acts as a means of political subordination. One of
the most pernicious features of prison expansion is that it devastates
community-based resources for contesting prison policy and other sys-
temic forms of disenfranchisement. Thus the representational absence
of Black women and mothers from these analyses miss the vital gen-
dered linkage between the prison system, the foster care system, and the
attack on the social and political power of poor Black communities, and
conversely devalues the central role of Black mothers in resisting such a
nexus of power (Roberts, 2012; Mohanty, 1988).
Those scant critical studies across the disciplines that engage di-
rectly with child removal are historically focused (Krieken, 2004; Robin-
son and Paten, 2008) or develop a critical engagement with social work
policy delinked from broader analysis of neoliberal political economy
(Scholfield et al., 2010; Kapp and Propp, 2002; Burgheim, 2005), and/
or place emphasis on the psychological, emotional, and cultural impact
of such policy for community cohesion and resilience (Mason and Gib-
107
son, 2004; ONeill, 2005). It is rare to find work which situates such
strategies within historic and contemporary political economy critique
of (neoliberal) capitalist coloniality and which interrogates and exposes
the political functions of this massive removal of children from racial-
ized subaltern mothers. A key exception is the work of Roberts (2007,
2009, and 2012) which explicitly seeks to expose and dissect the politi-
cal function of such systems in the case of the United States and their
role in reproducing a deeply unequal and dehumanizing social system
which systematically oppresses Black communities and Black mothers.
However, despite the importance of visibilizing historic and contempo-
rary forms of oppression such work speaks over the voices of racialized
mothers in that again they become re-presented as if global capitalism
were completely successful in subjugating Black mothers and mother-
hood. This re-produces, as Lugones (2010) and I (2014) argue, despite
social justice intentions, the invisibilization of the political subjectivity of
racialized subaltern mothers.
On the Need for Feminist Decolonizing

Methodologies
If we start from the decolonial feminist perspective of embracing the
place-based experiences and knowledges of subaltern racialized women
(Motta, 2014), then as Lugones (2010: 746) reminds us, it is belong-
ing to impure communities that gives life to her agency. This implies
beginning from the onto-epistemological politics of subaltern racial-
ized women through embracing the conflicting, tension-ridden experi-
ences of being at once subjugated as a racialized subaltern non-subject
and resisting this through active processes of subjectivity. It is here that
we move beyond both the representational invisibility of the racialized
women and also the racialized subaltern woman as victim detailed above,
to a perspective of feminism in decolonizing praxis (see also for a similar
critique Motta, 2013). This is by necessity a praxical task which implies
a stepping inwards to the contours of everyday life and the embodied
experience of the lived contradictions between the fiction and realities
of capitalist (self) representation, which as Lugones (2010: 746) describes
108
is to enact a critique of the racialised, colonial and capitalist het-

erosexualist gender oppression as a lived transformation of the social.
As such it places the theorist in the midst of the people in a historical,
peopled, subjective/intersubjective understanding of the oppressing-
resisting relation at the intersection of the complex systems of op-
pression.
The methodologies of the feminist in decolonial praxis become
methodologies of everyday life that enable her to co-facilitate processes
of critical intimacy as opposed to the groundless distance of research
embodied in the logics of coloniality (Motta, 2016). An epistemological
stepping inwards involves nurturing and experimenting with knowledge
processes in which we collectively bring to awareness how systems of
oppression wound us as communities and as individuals. However, it is
of no surprise that decolonizing epistemological practices comes from
those who inhabit the epistemological margins of colonial difference.
They emerge out of the struggle and practice against ontological and
epistemological denial as outsiders-within formal education and in the
multiple informal spaces of everyday life and community organizing
against processes of subjectification of coloniality. These processes of
subjectification are, as Lugones (2010: 748) describes
... met in the flesh over and over by oppositional responses grounded in
a long history of oppositional responses and lived as sensical in alterna-
tive, resistant socialities at the colonial difference.
It is also of no surprise that there is so little written about decolo-
nizing work for activist-researchers, for as Gill et al. (2012: 11) argue,
[there] is limited representation of these peoples in the academy.
Identifying as an outsider-within formal educational spaces, I have
embodied and embedded such commitments and practices of co-con-
struction in my scholarly practice through exploring with others ways
to bring to (our) life(ves) prefigurative epistemologies (Motta, 2011) and
methodologies of the storyteller (Motta, 2014, 2016). Prefigurative epis-
temologies are embedded in the collective construction of multiple read-
ings of the world, in which we tell our stories to re-enchant the world
and our communities, speak in multiple tongues, rethinking and creating
109
what it means to speak, to write, to theorize. Here we co-create the con-

ditions of possibility, and the terms of our own healing visibility to dis-
rupt both the death-producing logics of invisibility and the pathologiz-
ing gaze of hyper-visibility. As Anzalda (2007: 81) describes in relation
to her experience and eminently applicable here I will no longer be
made to feel ashamed of existing; I will have my voice I will have my
serpents tongue my womans voice.
Prefigurative epistemologies are inherently pedagogical in that
they involve the development of practices of (un)learning that enable
transformation of conditions of oppression. Critical to emancipatory
pedagogies such as these is an overcoming of the dualism between mind
and body, theory and practice, and knower and known. This involves, as
I have argued elsewhere, moving away from the Monological silencing
epistemologies of re-presentation and moving towards methodologies
of the storyteller. These methodologies foster processes of critical inti-
macy to co-create a politics of dialogical healing and transformation in
which all become co-constructors of knowledge, our social worlds, and
ourselves.
In my collaboration with Family Inclusion Strategy Hunter (FISH)
to date, such epistemological prefiguration has been methodologically
actualized in a decolonizing Participatory Action Research (PAR) pro-
cess which builds upon traditional PAR studies in its: i) conceptualiza-
tion of the boundaries of the research, ii) conceptualization of theory/
knowledge; iii) and the relationship posited between subject (researcher)
and object (researched). In terms of the boundaries of PAR, many PAR
studies tend to develop place-based ethnographies which bound the na-
ture of community participation and knowledge production to under-
standing local conditions, behaviors, and practices. Additionally, in many
PAR studies the researcher takes on the role of analyzing everyday life
from the standpoint of an outsider looking in (Akon, 2011: 115). Both
these limitations result from the epistemological assumptions that com-
munities knowledge is experiential and concrete, and it is the researcher
who is able to systematize and theorize more deeply these concrete ex-
periences in a way that will be of use to communities in their concrete
objectives of change (see Motta, 2011 for an extensive critique of this
position). However, such an epistemological underpinning reproduces
110
the hierarchies of a colonizing politics of knowledge, in which as deco-

lonial feminist scholars describe (Lugones, 2010; Motta, 2014), commu-
nities are considered unable to produce theoretical knowledge and the
thinker is posited as an abstract, individualized, and masculinized subject
able to separate from the messiness of embodied experience to produce
knowledge to guide everyday life. This invisibilizes the ways in which
theoretical knowledge can be produced collectively through processes
of critical reflection on the lived experiences of oppression and struggle,
and how theoretical knowledge and systematization can take multiple
forms including, but not limited to, the textual.
Thus the methodology developed in this research differs in its epis-
temological assumptions, as it specifically seeks to decentre the know-
ing-subject of coloniality and instead embrace collective processes of
knowledge construction and multiple forms of knowledge (written, oral,
visual) with participants in the research project. Such an epistemologi-
cal foundation also implies that the researcher moves away from repre-
senting the other and towards collective problem-solving, healing, and
transformation. The researchers experience and knowledge becomes
one element in the dialogue out of which a research project emerges.
It also implies that the researcher takes on a facilitative role in the co-
creation of knowledge for change (co-defined), becoming part of the
change-process itself. This re-orientates and dislodges the traditional du-
alism between research (subject of research) and researched (object of
research) as all become knowers and researchers.
These ethical, political, and epistemological commitments have
shaped my engagement and participation in FISH. They meant that I
joined as one participant amongst many, offering particular pedagogical
and methodological knowledge and experiences and open to co-create
the directions, practices, and objectives of FISH. Elements of this jour-
ney are outlined below as a way to foreground the onto-epistemological
practices of humanization, resilience, and hope of racialized subaltern
women and their allies.
111
Contesting the Violence of Coloniality of Child

Removal in Australia
Racist state technologies and rationalities of dehumanization which at-
tempt to (re)produce the non-subjectivity of subaltern racialized moth-
ers intertwine with the logics of the disciplinary neoliberal state in perni-
cious ways in contemporary Australia.
As Walter, Taylor and Habibis (2011: 11) argue in relation to social
work as a discipline and practice Whiteness as a concept, theory and
reflexive practice has a low visibility within the pedagogy and curriculum
of Australian social work [there] remains a Whiteness gap. The epis-
temological underpinnings of social work thus continue to be embed-
ded within logics of coloniality and the negation of the subjectivity and
epistemology of Aboriginal peoples. Social work education and expertise
remains located and embedded within a Eurocentric perspective, which
legitimizes a universalizing expert perspective that negates difference and
diversity, and instead reproduces the representational absence of the ra-
cialized subaltern mother as knower and carer (Young, 2011: 114115).
Such monological logics and rationalities imbricate smoothly with
the individualizing and pathologizing shifts in social work policy during
the neoliberal era. The principles underpinning current social policy for
child protection emphasize the centrality of the family and the primacy
of professional and scientific expertise, resulting in policy and practice
which focuses attention on the individual. The problem to be addressed
is isolated, and professional service or treatment is provided to change
and modify behavior in one or more of the protagonists within the con-
fines of the family unit. As Young (2008: 106) reflects it is clear that the
intricacies or complexities and varied forms of family life and human
behaviour that exist within a range of socio-economic and cultural cir-
cumstances are relegated in importance.
These intertwining logics of historic processes of dehumanization
and contemporary neoliberal forms of pathologization and re-trauma-
tizing interventions are perhaps most clearly manifested in the Northern
Territory Intervention of 2007. In this situation alleged cases of system-
atic child sexual abuse became a context in which the state intervened to
protect the children through a representation of Aboriginal communi-
112
ties as pathologically abusive and neglectful. Such social pathology was

used to legitimize militarized interventions and intensified surveillance
onto Aboriginal communities that continue to this day. The coloniality
of social work and the neoliberal disciplinary state here came together to
reproduce epistemological and ontological violence through policies of
surveillance and subjugation, claimed by their authors as policies of
deliverance and civilization (Young, 2008: 119).
In the context of the Hunter Valley, where FISH emerged, this con-
fluence of coloniality and contemporary disciplinary neoliberalism mani-
fests in the Hunter Central Coast region of NSW having the highest rate
of children and young people in out-of-home care in NSW in 2012/13
(NSW Family and Community Services, 2014), including continuing very
high rates of new entries to care. The rate is significantly higher than
most other regions. NSW has the highest proportion of children and
young people in out-of-home care in Australia with the exception of
the Northern Territory (AIHW, 2014). These two figures combined sug-
gest that this region has one of the highest proportions of children and
young people in out-of-home care in Australia. This is combined with
the privatization, closure and/or outsourcing of mental health, domestic
violence, and out-of-home care services (Cox, 2014). Juridically in the
state of New South Wales there is a shift towards support and recom-
mendation for adoption of children removed from their birth families
if the situation of risk and/or harm has not be resolved within set time-
frames and making adoption easier from out-of-home care without pa-
rental consent (see FACS, 2013 for an overview of these changes which
mirror similar shifts in the US, Roberts, 2007, 2009). This is embedded
and reflected in social work training and practice with a shift away from
traditions of community welfare and social justice-orientated praxis to-
wards neoliberal individualized and risk-focused interventions and dis-
cursive framings of child protection issues. This tends to individualize
social problems facing subaltern communities and families and pit child
interests against those of parents and families framing the role of the
social worker/child protection agent as protecting children against unfit
parents (Rogowski, 2015; Thorpe, 2007; FIN, 2007).
In this context critical practitioners from the out-of-home care
NGO sectors, critical scholars, and a small group of parents who had
113
experienced or were experiencing the out-of-home care and child protec-

tion systems came together in early 2014 to form a steering-group called
Family Inclusion Strategy Hunter. FISH emerged out of growing con-
cern of the lack of voice and representation of marginalized families in
out-of-home care processes and shared the broad intention of facilitat-
ing processes and practices of parent voice and participation. The group
converged on a commitment to addressing these issues with a parent-
centered approach to facilitate the voice, visibility, and agency of families
so as to foster reflexive and inclusive practice and transform/reform of
the discourses that shape and frame policy and practice.
My resonances with the orientation of FISH were its commitment
to collaborative and dialogical knowledge processes with parents and
families facing the disciplinary neoliberal state, questioning of the in-
dividualization of social ills discourse framing policy interventions and
commitment to fostering critical reflexivity amongst practitioners. My
engagement has focused on supporting the development of method-
ologies that facilitate the construction of knowledges for transforma-
tion, active engagement with developing and consolidating processes
and practices of critical reflection with critical practitioners in the out-
of-home care sector, and supporting the process of consolidating and
nurturing the sustainability of FISH over the medium and long term.
Through this process my own framing of practitioners in this sector has
changed from one of mistrusting homogenization to empathy and con-
nection across our shared commitments to maintaining radical traditions
of public service amidst increasing colonization by marketized logics.
This has involved the beginnings of a transformative dialogue between
traditions of narrative therapy and feminist popular education.
Below I detail three stories which I believe contribute to putting in
action a feminism in decolonization praxis of transformation in text and
body, and which I hope support FISHs critical reflectivity and praxis, as
well as offering a contribution to the broader dialogue of how to trans-
form, resist, and transgress historic and contemporary practices of state
dehumanization of racialized subaltern mothers and communities.
114
Decolonizing Monologues of Intervention through

Dialogues of Connection
Our first public event was targeted to practitioners and organizations in
the field of out-of-home care. We spent a number of months as a group
coming up with a wicked question around which we would organize
the first ever family inclusion practice forum to be held in the Hunter
Valley. The question that emerged was: How can we support parents
and family to have better relationship with their children in out-of-home
care?. This question was chosen as it enabled a discussion and critical
reflection of the plight of children and young people in child protection
and out-of-home care systems at a range of levels, including the voices
of children and young people, the voices of parents and families of chil-
dren in out-of-home care, those of authorized caregivers, and of prac-
titioners in family support and other welfare services as well as policy
makers and program developers.
The group spent a number of months thinking deeply and dialogi-
cally about the methods that would most suit the objectives of building
practice partnerships between families and children, and practitioners
that could enact change and transformation to improve the outcomes
and experiences of marginalized children and families. We wished to en-
able the sharing of stories from both parents and practitioners of the
out-of-home care sector as a way to identify a shared understanding of
the problems and developing next steps (Cox, 2014: 6). However, we
felt strongly that the emphasis should be on parent voices being heard
and the perspective of parents and family being foregrounded as key
to any meaningful dialogue in the out-of-home sector. We thus began
the day with a parent panel in which four parents who had interacted
with the child protection and out-of-home care systems acted as experts
and consultants. They attended the forum to share their stories, experi-
ences, and knowledges of the service system and to provide advice to
practitioner participants about what had worked well and what needed
change. They participated in the entire forum as experts contributing to
the ongoing discussion with practitioners. We then organized the rest of
the day around participatory methods of knowledge construction which
included world cafe (see Appendix 1) and open space technology meth-
ods (see Appendix 2).
115
Out of our dialogue emerged five key areas for practice and policy
change, as well as a number of ways forward (to be detailed in the fol-
lowing experience). We agreed to write up the process of emergence of
FISH, the methodology of organizing the practice forum, and the key
themes and outcomes of the forum as a report aimed at families and
practitioners experiencing and working in the sector. The methodology
of writing up the report mirrored that of the forum, in that we aimed to
be as dialogical and inclusive as possible within time and material con-
straints. Jessica Cocks wrote up the initial notes and reflections from the
forum and then with other practitioners deepened the dialogue with the
parent experts in relation to comments and ideas that had emerged from
their contribution. This was then sent on numerous iterations to critical
educators and other members of FISH for their comments and reflec-
tions. The report Building Better Relationships: Family Inclusion Strat-
egies Hunter: Outcomes of the Family Inclusion Forum was launched
in early 2015.
The ethical and epistemological praxis of FISH enact a decoloniza-
tion of the Monologues of interventions that have and continue to char-
acterize dominant state interventions on the body and into the family
and community of racialized subaltern mothers, their children and fami-
lies. FISHs practice enacts a radical disruption of the implicit hierarchies
of knowledge and rationality on which they are premised and de-centers
the terms of the epistemologically and politically violent conversation of
coloniality in Australia.
This affirmative dialogical praxis does not seek to enclose the con-
versation about out-of-home care and the families and children impact-
ed by this system into a homogenous uni-dimensional solution. Rather
there is an embrace of complexities, multiplicity, and openness to the
voices of racialized subaltern mothers, their children and families. Im-
plicit within this practice is the foregrounding of a radical democratizing
practice of community welfare that offers horizons to re-think the state
and its social policy interventions in relation to subaltern communities.
Such a radical re-thinking and reclaiming mirrors the work of sister orga-
nization Family Inclusion Network, Queensland (FIN) which describes
their practice as embedded in radical community and social justice tradi-
tions that seek to tap into, support and enable and underpin informal
116
community relationship, with a view to developing community groups

characterised by mutuality and democracy, and committed to personal
support and collective action (Thorpe and Ramsden, 2014: 66; see also
Cary et al., 2007).
Importantly the embodied lived experiences of the families and
mothers are reframed and re-narrativized as sources of expertise and
knowledge as opposed to spaces of lack, criminality, and deviance. The
body of the racialized and feminized subaltern becomes recognized and
embraced as a site of wisdom and rationality. This involves disruption
of dominant embodied performances of expertise and professional-
ism in which the knower is the deplaced academic and policy maker
who empowers the practitioner to intervene into the infantilized and
pathologized lives of subaltern racialized mothers and families. As FIN
(Thorpe and Ramsden, 2014: 66) reflect on their practice this involves
refram[ing] conventional professional boundaries... work[ing] with
families and develop[ing] relationship with equal power. Similarly, for
FISH, deplaced and disembodied hierarchical distance becomes transfig-
ured and prefigured with placed and embodied dialogical intimacy and
connection.
Such encounters between critical practitioners and families and
mothers affected by the system disrupt the affective hierarchies of
dominant professionalized interactions in that as opposed to hierarchical
separation and differentiation, emotional relationships of empathy, care,
and friendship are fostered (see also Thorpe and Ramsden, 2014: 67 in
relation to the concept of resourceful friends). This involved the practi-
tioner being silent as opposed to talking and taking the authorial voice,
and as such supported the creation of the conditions of possibility for
decolonizing dialogue (Young, 2008: 117). The stories of parents and
mothers impacted by the out-of-home care and child protection sectors
deeply impacted the practitioners at the Forum. For most this was the
first time that they had heard the stories of their clients. This caused
productive discomfort which led to critical reflection and the emergence
of new relationships of understanding and solidarity. We had co-created
a space that as Coombes, Johnson and Howitt (2014) describe [was]
a pedagogical safe place that enable[d] inter-subjective contemplation
and growth in consciousness about social processes and options for
[change].
117
Co-Construction of Knowledges for

Transformation
Reflecting back to the experience of the first forum, FISH as a group
made a leap of faith and had a level of trust (often not explicitly spoken)
in a co-constructed process of change embedded in the knowledges of
parents and front-line critical practitioners. In our discussions we agreed
on the importance of facilitating the forum mindfully around the objec-
tives of enabling deep reflection as a means to come up with concrete
ways forward for our work individually, collectively, and organizationally.
As a key commitment was to visibilize and amplify parent and family
voices that had experienced the removal of their children into out-of-
home care for a short or long time, we wanted those voices to be given
emphasis.
Our decision to begin with a parent as expert/consultant panel re-
flected this. The questions for the panel were prepared in advance and
parents on the panel gave their suggestions and comments on them
beforehand (see Appendix for questions). In our preparations we were
mindful not to close off avenues of discussion and so as opposed to
pre-framing the themes to be discussed after the parent-expert panel we
instead chose two open-ended questions about family-inclusive practice.
We organized the reflections around a world caf model (Brown, 2005)
in which pieces of butchers paper were placed on separate tables. We
then asked participants to move to a table of their choice and then to
move around as a group so that all groups engaged collectively with the
different answers and reflections that were emerging. We hoped that as a
method this would enable a deepening of reflection on each question as
each group added and engaged with what previous groups had written
and discussed and then returned to their original table.
Our final session was organized as an Open Space session (as de-
scribed in Michael Herman Associates, 1998). This began with the facili-
tator asking participants to suggest a question that emerged from their
reflections and that would help us to think of ways forward in facilitating
family inclusion in out-of-home care. Five questions were suggested by
distinct individuals who were then asked to be the facilitator of discus-
sion around their question. Other participants were then free to move to
118
any discussion during the remaining time of the forum. Throughout the
day participants from FISH took notes of reflections and discussions
and we noted down everything that was discussed in groups on butchers
paper, which were gradually put up around the room so that all partici-
pants could continue their individual and group reflections over lunch
and during breaks. The report emerging out of the forum was organized
around these notes and the themes and key questions and answers that
emerged.
The key outcomes of the forum involved a focus on five themes:
individual practice change, partnerships between careers, family and the
service system, re-thinking models of out-of-home care and earlier inter-
vention, and opportunities for innovation and systematic change. Under
each were detailed areas where things were working, areas where there
were problems and barriers and suggestions for both concrete and sys-
tematic change. In the latter this also involved commitment to further
research, reflection, and collective action (Cox, 2014: 1828).
The outcomes are too broad and complex to be detailed here, but
some of the most significant are visibilizing the detrimental impact of
individualizing questions of deprivation and violence, and how this re-
sulted in practices of shaming, blaming, and humiliation of parents;
challenging the dominant framing of out-of-home care and child pro-
tection which often pits the needs of children against those of family;
innovating in experimenting with different forms of kinship care and the
idea of fostering and supporting families; the important role of reflexiv-
ity in practice; and the importance of collective learning and collabora-
tion between carers, families, and practitioners. Our findings speak to the
continued existence of the pathologization of racialized subaltern moth-
ers as an institutional method of subjugation in which these mothers are
hyper-visible as objects of intervention but also invisibilized and denied
as knowing subjects and legitimate caregivers.
The methodology of the FORUM (both as process, event, and out-
come) is but one example of the many layers and forms of collective
knowledge production that FISH are pioneering and prefiguring. Com-
mon to our practice is that it foregrounds a politics of knowledge that
honors the embodied lived experiences of families and children as the
starting point for engagement in the complex problems of deprivation,
119
marginalization, and violences often experienced by subaltern commu-

nities. It thus moves away from either a pathologizing and/or merely
victimizing framing of racialized subaltern families and communities.
Beginning from these experiences is an acknowledgement and commit-
ment to fostering and strengthening active processes of subjectivity. Key
to this is a practice of dialogue and commitment to listening, in complete
divergence from the dominant historic and contemporary state practices
in the sector.
However, there is also another subject who is often invisibilized and
devalued in the relationship between state and racialized subaltern fam-
ily and women. This is the practitioner and worker in the out-of-home
care sector. It is easy to (re)produce simplistic binaries which conflate the
practitioner with the states logics and thus re-present her as an agent of
dehumanization. It is also easy to fall into the dominant discourse which
posits practitioners and workers as mere agents of implementation that
lack critical reflexivity and expertise. However, striking from practitio-
ners reflections were the resonances with the stories and experiences of
critical educators trying to keep spaces of hope and possibility alive in an
increasingly neoliberalized education sector (see for example Motta and
Cole, 2014). These included time and resource scarcity, innovating on
the margins (often on top of their normal work load) and thus taking on
invisibilized and devalued labor, feelings of isolation, erosion of spaces
for critical reflection on practice, discourses of delegitimization, and yet
incredible commitment to humanizing praxis with marginalized commu-
nities, families and children (for a discussion of some of these tensions
in the Australian context see Scherz, 2011).
This mirrors and reinforces the reflections of FINs praxis. Ros
Thorpe and Kim Ramsden (2014) in detailing these experiences demon-
strate how they involve reclaiming community and social justice orien-
tations of community work and social work. This, she argues, involves
disrupting normalized framings of professionalism embedded in hierar-
chical separation between professional and client, and judging practices
of professional towards communities, families and parents. Instead they
argue for the forming of ally friendships premised on recognition, con-
nection, and respect. She conceptualizes this kind of praxis as fostering
and developing a friendship model based on the resourceful friend con-
120
cept. The qualities of such an ally are respect and empathylove of

humanityreliable and dependable, being open to contact at times of
need, including evenings and weekends, reaching out and making contact
when parents are immobilised by depression, and doing the extra mile.
These qualities and practices of being and relating, as she continues, re-
duce the interpersonal distance between supporters and families... [such]
co-producing practice with service users is a profoundly professional act
and aids in healing from trauma (Thorpe and Ramsden, 2014: 6667).
FISHs work arguably mirrors such praxis. The questions this raises
in relation to the use and abuse of social work for decolonizing commu-
nity work are immense, and again are reminiscent of those asked about
the critical educator in the university and strategies which are at once in,
against, and beyond the subjectivity and institution of education as hege-
monically practiced. How might a strategy and praxis of in, against, and
beyond social work and the figure of the social worker be put to work
usefully, ethically, and meaningfully with practitioners and families? How
might a decolonizing of social work be actualized? These are not ques-
tions I can answer here as these are praxical questions that emerge and
can only be engaged with in the collaborative and reflexive co-creation
of organizations such as FISH and FIN. However, it is essential in our
exploration of these questions to engage with those marginalized voices
within social work studies who bring a critique of whiteness and colo-
niality to bear on historic and contemporary social work epistemology
and practice (see for example Young, 2008; Walter, Taylor and Habibis,
2011). Undoubtedly too, these are questions that will come to have in-
creasing importance as the logics and consequences of the intertwining
of coloniality and disciplinary neoliberalism become sites of political
contestation.
Encounters across Borders: Embodying and

Embedding Critical Reflexivity
The stories that I tell in relation to encounters across borders are more
intimate in nature in that they do not involve reflection on the more vis-
ible public pedagogy of FISH and how this embodies and prefigures the
politics of knowledge of our praxis. Rather I refer to encounters that oc-
121
cur as part of the day-to-day building of relationships and practices out

of which we might nurture FISH as a collective and group of individuals
articulating distinct humanizing voices in the out-of-home care sector
and as/with racialized subaltern families and mothers.
After the Forum FISH moved forward to create a number of sub-
groups which mapped onto the key themes and ways forward emerging
out of the process and identified in the report. I joined the storytelling
group whose aim was to collect stories of practitioners and families as a
process of prefigurative change and also as a resource that could be used
to facilitate further change and transformation. Our initial discussion
revolved around the creation of a project of critical reflection with prac-
titioners in which we would hold monthly meetings to facilitate reflection
in relation to the five themes emerging from the Forum process. Whilst
this project did not materialize due in most part to the time and resource
scarcity and restraints identified in the Forum, the process of thinking
through this project, reflecting on its non-materialization, and think-
ing of further ways forward opened another kind of dialogue between
FISH participants. More specifically, we shared our experiences and un-
derstanding of storytelling as a means of developing a shared language
through which to communicate our understanding and intentions with
storytelling as a methodology. This opened a dialogue between tradi-
tions of critical narrative therapy which was influential with practitioners
and feminist, decolonial popular education traditions which have shaped
my practice. Clarity emerged as to the crossovers in our understanding
and commitments, as well as deeper reflection about the collective na-
ture of these methodologies and their explicit commitment to disrupt
individualized and normalizing/pathologizing accounts and discourses
of violence, marginalization, and addiction by situating them within the
broader socio-economic, discursive and political conditions and causes
as well as disrupting hegemonic conservative framings of family which
tend to devalue and problematize other families.
This then opened the possibility for me to support the critical re-
flection on practice of a narrative practitioner from the group who was
facilitating a collective narrative project with families who had experi-
enced out-of-home care. This was a learning process in which questions
of the art of facilitation, openness, and closure as well as (self)care of
122
the facilitator emerged. The hope was that this supported both our indi-
vidual praxis but also deepened a shared critical narrative in relation to
our work in FISH and more generally in community practice.
This engagement led to a humanization of our relationship as we
came to know each other and our commitments more deeply. The forg-
ing of such linkages of solidarity fostered trust, active listening, and
deepened the sense of a we which did not eradicate our differences
and distinctive orientations of praxis but created a basis from which we
might develop these. As part of this, I acted as a witness in an interview
process (see White, 2007) with a mother from the project using a critical
narrative therapy approach. In this instance, a number of us who volun-
teered from FISH were to act as witnesses to her journey with out-of-
home care and processes of restoration.
As witnesses we were asked to reflect on that which resonated from
her story and why we thought this resonated, which elements of our life
and work it connected to, and how this experience of hearing and reflect-
ing on her story had changed us in some way. The methodology seeks to
disrupt the internalization of individualized and pathologizing discours-
es of deficiency and turn towards recognition of agency, understanding,
wisdom, and resilience. It also opens the possibility of re-framing the
individual and communitys experience within broader social and politi-
cal conditions and processes. Such methods are based in a methodology
of deep dialogue which disrupts the self and other binary upon which
the entire matrix of state intervention upon the racialized and feminized
subaltern body politic is premised. As Young (2008: 117) describes A
genuine [decolonizing] human relationship, contrarily, is based on mutu-
ality and a deep attention to the other. Such intimate connection also
invites reflection on the ways in which the story of the other actually
has implications and resonances for our stories of self.
Creating a safe space for such critical intimacy as shared learning for
transformation embodies commitments I have made in previous work
about the methodologies of the storyteller in which [she] enters in her
integrity and wholeness in this process of epistemological reinvention.
She does not enter as an external liberated knower to educate and speak
for the unfree masses. She does not reproduce a victim re-presentation
of the oppressed in her practice but rather begins from a commitment
123
to weaving together subjects, practices and stories of agency, dignity and

survival (Motta, 2014). Methodologies embodied and embedded in crit-
ical intimacy work with vulnerability as strength and are mindful of the
creation of shared and safe spaces of encounter. As hooks (2003: 216)
explains, We cannot really risk emotionally in relationships where we do
not feel safe. As opposed to processes of shaming, naming, and blam-
ing comes practices, relationships, and ethics embedded in care.
This experience helps to centre the enactment and embodiment of
witnessing as part of prefigurative epistemologies of transformation. Yet
it troubles any simplistic binary framing of such practices, for in this en-
counter we become both witness to an other but also to our selves.
And of course this relates to an earlier observation about how often
those called to embrace decolonizing (feminist) methodologies are those
of us, as Anzalda describes, who knew we were different, set apart, ex-
iled from what is considered normal. And as we internalised this exile,
we came to see the alien within us and too often, as a result, we split apart
from ourselves and each other. Forever after we have been in search of
that self, that other and each other (cited in Keating, 2009: ix). In my
encounter with Christina1 and her story I was able to give testimony to
some of my story, to dislodge perceived unbridgeable borders of dif-
ference and separation, and to create unexpected empowering recogni-
tions and connections.
Tensions as Sites of Possibility

There are, of course numerous tensions in the praxis detailed above.
Firstly, the institutionalized nature of FISH; in that it publically repre-
sents itself as a steering-group organization, not a political or commu-
nity movement. Such self-representation was perhaps inevitable in the
broader context of severe socio-political fragmentation and subaltern
political disarticulation (as detailed previously). The ability to shape-shift
from more openly political practices and interventions to expert contri-
butions to a social and policy debate has enabled FISH to attract a broad
range of participants. However, it has also acted as a limit on how far
1
This mothers name has been changed for reasons of privacy and confiden-
tiality.
124
the explicitly political practice of the organization can go (not only as

self-representation but as material-epistemological practice). Secondly,
there is a tension-ridden relationship between an ethics/politics of care
and carelessness. Whilst there is a clear focus on an ethics of care and
care-full attention towards birth parents and families and their children,
there is, as is often the case, less attentiveness to the logics and ratio-
nalities of carelessness which structure the everyday contexts of critical
practitioners in the third-sector and popular educators and researchers
in the HE sector. Institutional logics which push for 24/7 availability,
infinite flexibility, and ever-increasing measurable output undercut the
conditions of possibility for the tender and slow work of constructing
an other politics and practice of child protection and out-of-home care.
They create a context in which practitioners and researchers can easily
become internally split, enacting care for others, yet reproducing care-
lessness for themselves.
Such a tension can perhaps be understood if we think to the very
foundations of social work and policy, and higher education, which pos-
ited the racialized and feminized other as an object of intervention, to
be at worst annihilated and at best saved. These logics and rationalities
often implicitly shape the narratives and framings of the critical praxis
within FISH, so that questions of healing, voice, and participation re-
main focused on subaltern mothers and their families. This is of course
absolutely fundamental. Yet it avoids the explicit project of decoloniz-
ing of the subjectivity of the social worker and the researcher, which
would involve reflection and recognition of the ways in which patriarchal
capitalist-coloniality marks, dehumanizes, and wounds their subjectivity.
Emergent Possibilities for Decolonizing Australias

Body Politics
Emerging from and with engagement with racialized subaltern mothers
and families, and allies, FISH is embodying and embedding possibilities
for an emergent decolonial politics which seeks not recognition within,
but disruption of, the coloniality of the political as it has and continues
to structure Australias state and democratic polity.
FISHs politics of knowledge contributes to a politics that disrupts
and dislodges the hierarchical and disembodied politics of knowledge
125
that has structured Australian state interventions onto the body and into
the families and communities of racialized subaltern women, specifically
Indigenous, poor-white, and refugee mothers and their families. It re-
places these with co-constructed knowledge practices which value the
wisdom and knowledges of racialized subaltern mothers and prefigure
relationships of care, reciprocity, and dialogue that are deeply human-
izing and democratizing.
Processes of critical reflection by racialized subaltern mothers
about experiences of biopolitical dehumanization begin the unlearning
of the oppressors logics through healing of the traumas inflicted by
the Australian state. This fosters active processes of subjectivity which
enable the emergence of new forms of individual and collective subjec-
tivity. Critical practitioners become border-thinkers disrupting state log-
ics, becoming supportive friends to mothers and families, and reclaiming
traditions and practices of community and social justice work. In many
ways their praxis works in, against, and beyond the confines of pro-
fessional categories of social work and the figure of the social worker,
opening possibilities for a radical community practice which prefigures
an other practice and subject of an emergent politics that is multiple.
These processes of emergent political possibility resonate with a
feminism in decolonizing praxis for they nurture, and are enabled by,
processes of critical intimacy in which we collectively and collaboratively
experiment with prefigurative epistemologies and methodologies of the
storyteller. As Lugones (1992: 33) describes, summarizing the practice
of Gloria Anzalda, the against-the grain storyteller pushes against the
limits of oppression through fostering dialogue between and within the
multiple moments and places of the colonial difference. In this way the
storytellers of decolonizing critique (both outsiders-within formal edu-
cation and organizers within and of the community) become part of a
new epistemological terrain toward a newness of be-ing incarnating
a weave from the fractured locus that constitutes a creative, peopled re-
creation (Lugones, 2010: 754).
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APPENDIX 1
World Caf at a glance: (http://www.theworldcafe.com/wp-content/up-
loads/2015/07/Cafe-To-Go-Revised.pdf)
Seat four (five max) people at small Caf-style tables or in con-
versation clusters.
Set up progressive (at least three) rounds of conversation, ap-
proximately 20 minutes each.
Engage questions or issues that genuinely matter to your life,
work, or community.
Encourage participants to write, doodle and draw key ideas on
their tablecloths (and/ or note key ideas on large index cards or
placemats in the center of the table).
Upon completing the initial round of conversation, you may ask
one person to remain at the table as a table host for the next
round, while the others serve as travelers or ambassadors of
meaning. The travelers carry key ideas, themes and questions into
131
their new conversations, while the table host welcomes the new set
of travelers.
By providing opportunities for people to move in several rounds
of conversation, ideas, questions, and themes begin to link and
connect. At the end of the second or third round, all of the tables
or conversation clusters in the room will be cross- pollinated with
insights from prior conversations.
In the last round of conversation, people can return to their rest
table to synthesize their discoveries, or they may continue traveling
to new tables.
You may use the same question for one or more rounds of con-
versation, or you may pose different questions in each round to
build on and help deepen the exploration.
After at least three rounds of conversation, initiate a period of
sharing discoveries & insights in a whole group conversation. It
is in these town meeting-style conversations that patterns can be
identified, collective knowledge grows, and possibilities for action
emerge.
APPENDIX 2
(http://www.chriscorrigan.com/openspace/whatisos.html)
Open Space Technology has been defined as:
a simple, powerful way to catalyze effective working conversa-
tions and truly inviting organizations -- to thrive in times of swirl-
ing change.
a methodological tool that enables self-organizing groups of all
sizes to deal with hugely complex issues in a very short period of
time.
a powerful group process that supports positive transformation
in organizations, increases productivity, inspires creative solutions,
improves communication and enhances collaboration.
the most effective process for organizations and communities to
identify critical issues, voice to their passions and concerns, learn
from each other, and, when appropriate, take collective responsibil-
ity for finding solutions.
132
The goal of an Open Space Technology meeting is to create time

and space for people to engage deeply and creatively around issues of
concern to them. The agenda is set by people with the power and desire
to see it through, and typically, Open Space meetings result in transfor-
mative experiences for the individuals and groups involved.
What does Open Space look like?

A meeting room prepared for Open Space has a circle of chairs in the
middle, letters or numbers around the room to indicate meeting loca-
tions, a blank wall that will become the agenda and a news wall for re-
cording and posting the results of the dialogue sessions.
Essentially an Open Space meeting proceeds along the following
process:
Group convenes in a circle and is welcomed by the sponsor. The
facilitator provides an overview of the process and explains how it
works.
Facilitator invites people with issues of concern to come into the
circle, write the issue on a piece of quarter size flip chart paper and
announce it to the group. These people are conveners.
The convener places their paper on the wall and chooses a time
and a place to meet. This process continues until there are no more
agenda items.
The group then breaks up and heads to the agenda wall, by now
covered with a variety of sessions. Participants take note of the
time and place for sessions they want to be involved in.
Dialogue sessions convene for the balance of the meeting. Re-
corders determined by each group capture the important points
and post the reports on the news wall. All of these reports will be
rolled into one document by the end of the meeting.
Following a closing or a break, the group might move into con-
vergence, a process that takes the issues that have been discussed
and attaches action plans to them to get them out of the room.
The group then finishes the meeting with a closing circle where
people are invited to share comments, insights, and commitments arising
from the process.
133
Sexual and Spiritual R-Evolution

through Animism:
The Feminine Semiotics of Puppetry
Aja Marneweck
University of Cape Town, South Africa
Abstract
The following article interprets resistant representational strategies of the femi-
nine through animism based creative practices such as puppetry. Acknowledging
critical issues at the heart of identity, representation and embodiment in South
Africa today, the Feminine Semiotics of animism seek new pathways to imagining
feminine form, theory and being. Liminality, multigeneity, leakage and perme-
ability are key to understanding the embodied surfaces of the Feminine Semiotic
as it arises in animist puppetry practices. Puppetry reveals itself as a sentient tool
that simultaneously exposes the constructs of being whilst engaging in what could
be described as a performative alchemy of imagination and form. The Feminine
Semiotics of puppetry offer a representational strategy for syncretic identities in
a complex marriage between content and form, intersections of metaphor and
critique, surface and innovation represented through the thresholds of animist
practices. In the 21st century, womens puppetry is emerging as a means to push
the margins of complex political and sexual discourse as the language of the femi-
nine body expressed in her multiplicitous identities and sexualities of resistance.
The article interprets the syncretic, threshold spaces of creative practice through
the theories of filmmaker and cultural theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha (1987) and
what she terms the inappropriate other that characterizes the emergent third in
feminine representation. Through the expression of the inappropriate other, iden-
tities of difference recreate, deconstruct and refract each other, rather than simply
replicating or resisting traditional conventions (Minh-ha, 1987). Puppetry, as the
emergent third in this light, may lead to alchemy in practice, expressed between the
surfaces of womens identity in critique and creativity. The practices of two sig-
nificant female artists, Nandipha Mntambo and Jill Joubert, explore the sexual
and political intersectionality of animism in sculptural and puppetry practices.
Contemporary animism-based creative practices are shown to proffer strategies for
134
AJA MARNEWECK SEXUAL AND SPIRITUAL R-EVOLUTION THROUGH ANIMISM:
expansive creative distillations that provide new trajectories for feminine resistance
and empowerment.
The Feminine Semiotics of Puppetry: Towards an

Emergent Third
We are interstitial creatures and border citizens by nature insiders/
outsiders at the same time and we rejoice in this paradoxical condi-
tion. In the act of crossing a border, we find temporary emancipation.
(Gmez-Pea, 2001)
In the 21st century, womens puppetry practices are emerging to push the
margins of political, cultural and sexual identities. Pre-figurative and pro-
creative artistic practices such as puppetry can provide women with tools
for both complex expression and creative plurality, which this article un-
packs specifically in light of their significance as a feminizing, de-colo-
nizing form of artistic resistance. I explore how animism-based creative
practices such as puppetry can evoke critical and contentious languages
of a co-constructive femininity in strategies of resistance today. Writ-
ing on critical creative and political approaches to the re-invention of
resistance, Sara Motta (2014: 11) insists that it is not only a necessity but
our responsibility to re-imagine emancipatory politics within feminizing,
decolonizing approaches that foster the creation of ourselves and our
world differently.
Animism and puppetry offer multiple pathways into re-imagining
epistemology through embodied, pre-figurative knowledge systems that,
as I will explore, engage multiple levels of meaning, sentience and aes-
thetics simultaneously. In light of the feminization of resistance set forth
by Motta (2013), I articulate this complex approach to exploring multi-
plex identity through emancipatory artistic practices such as puppetry
as a Feminine Semiotic. The Feminine Semiotic is a critical as well as
embodied approach to interpreting the potential of animist practices as
resistant feminine creativity. It is a proposal for creative, critical strategy
that addresses the spaces of the sacred feminine, liminality, flux, excess
and transformation held within puppetry practices.
135
Puppetry is one of the oldest forms of multidisciplinary creative

practice. As an artistic and cultural phenomenon, puppetry has found
its way through antiquity to the present day in many countries across
the world. Taking its roots from animism, puppetry is performance that
seeks the life within things. As a creative and discursive discipline in its
own right, puppetry posits the performative object and performing things
at the forefront of artistic practices as well as critical discourses. Puppets
combine anthropomorphic imagination and magical thinking with the
plastic arts, materials, objects and the form of things which
serve both as important metaphors and tangible expressions of our

continually changing understanding of what it means to be human.
They emerge as vital artistic elements at times when we question and
reconceive longstanding paradigms about human beings and our re-
lationship to the inanimate world, offering concrete means of play-
ing with new embodiments of humanity. (Posner, Orenstein and Bell,
2014: 2)
Masks and figurines have been used throughout the African conti-
nent in myriad diverse contexts (Joubert, 2006). Indeed, there are many
masking, doll and figurine traditions that have evolved to meet the par-
ticular needs of various societies and transformed into contemporary
modes of expression. A key to the revitalization of puppetry and its
import in contemporary performance practices is its potential for inter-
disciplinarity. Puppetry exists through combinations of the performing
and plastic arts and cannot be clearly confined into any one category. At
its core, it combines the kinesthetic and the constructed object/form
with multiple layers of meaning-making, metaphor and symbolism.
Puppetrys status as an underdog to the acknowledged separatist
practices of performance and fine art posits itself on the thresholds of
categorization and legitimization. It exists in a state of collaboration, hy-
bridity and liminality. This multiplicity also places it in a shared position
of marginality to dominant discourse, as an inappropriate other of the
performance and art worlds. Today in South Africa, the term Puppetry is
often loosely incorporated into the interstructural category of Visual Per-
formance. The genre offers an entry point to contemporary performance
136
and it arises in many different modes such as performance art, move-

ment, theatre, multimedia and storytelling, amongst others.
Puppetry is a threshold, border practice concerned with creative
multidisciplinarity that could provide a potentially resistant representa-
tion of the subaltern feminine. The Feminine Semiotics of puppetry
offer a representational strategy for syncretic identities in a complex
marriage between content and form, metaphor and critique, surface and
innovation, as represented through the emergent third spaces of ani-
mist practices. The trajectories of embodied, original, and imaginative
practices offer theoretical excess that I believe is crucial to exploring
South African womens creativity. They invoke the liminal and inappro-
priate other in narratives of complex feminine experience.
The Feminine Semiotic arises as a term that embraces postcolonial
and feminist cultural theory in order to re-imagine where materialist and
radical divisions might meet with puppetry and animism, and to imag-
ine embodied knowledge strategies for feminine performance in South
Africa today. I develop the terminology of the Feminine Semiotic from
the transgressive body of the female imaginary proposed by radical femi-
nist theorists Hlne Cixous (1976) and Luce Irigaray (1985), integrating
Julia Kristevas notion of the semiotic as that which disrupts the order
of the masculine symbolic (1982). I align it to the converging material-
ist/radical underpinnings of Sue Ellen Cases new poetics (1998) as well as
Geraldine Harris and Elaine Astons search for embodied knowledge
as a paradigm for knowing (2008). I also most importantly interpret this
re-designation of the libidinal feminine body of desire within the third
space of the inappropriate other as set forth by Trinh T. Minh-ha within
a postcolonial feminist framework. It is my aligning of these concepts
which has guided my understanding of the creative research at play in
womens puppetry practices and the complex interplays of meaning and
subversion in these art forms.
French theorist Julia Kristeva has advanced a feminist position on
feminine sexual signification by re-interpreting the word semiotic into
a Post-Lacanian theoretical approach to analyzing the construction of
sexuality and division. This re-reading of the term provides a feminist
distinction between what Kristeva interprets as the semiotic and the symbol-
ic, and the resultant signification composed of these two binary elements.
137
Kelly Oliver describes the semiotic element of Kristevas theory as the in-
terpretation of libidinal bodily drives associated with the rhythms, tones
and kinetics of signifying practices. It is a discharge of drives (Oliver,
1998: 2) linked to the maternal body which creates her semiotics as a
destabilizing, feminized element of representation. The symbolic aspect
of signification for Kristeva is linked to the grammar, rigidity and struc-
ture of reference and language. For Kristeva, the imaginary/semiotic can
never be clearly separated from the symbolic/thetic, but always operates
to destabilize the process of subjectification. The stasis of structuralist
approaches to cultural production poses a problem for Kristeva whose
theories of subjectivity look towards the potential heterogeneity of sub-
jective experience, rather than the fixity of homogeneity in language and
consciousness (Moi, 1985: 166).
South African cultural theorist Sarah Nuttall asks, how do we de-
segregate critical thinking and artistic practice in order to explore the in-
terwoven aspects of South African womens identity at play today (2010)?
The complex trajectories and constant entwinements of subaltern femi-
nine identity require more in-depth exploration in creative practice, what
Nuttall calls a thinking across from the inside (Nuttall, 2010). In or-
der to avoid the pitfalls of reductionism, we cannot assume a feminine
biologism or category of the feminine, outside of the complex inter-
sectionalities of gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, religion,
caste, age, nationality and other complex components of identity. The
fundamentalism of a concept of woman is one that has haunted the
western feminist movement with exclusionism on multiple levels. Post-
colonial, transnational and subaltern feminism since the early 1980s has
confronted western feminist theorys failure to adequately account for
racial and cultural difference in its critical approaches. Criticism of the
universalizing essentialism and biological determinism of the concept
of woman and feminine is inherent in any assertion of a universal
femininity and language. The concern is centered in the racial dynamics
and habits of privilege, which have perpetuated and established many
dominant social ideologies and prejudices across feminized movements
that privilege white subjectivities (Garrett, 2002: 40). Positions of other-
ness in the dynamics of separation are always reinforced in reference to
the non-other, the insider, the privileged subject of discourse (Spivak,
1988).
138
The theories of film-maker and postcolonial cultural theorist Trinh

T. Minh-ha inspire my research through what she terms the inappropriate
other that characterizes an emergent third space in womens creative prac-
tices (Minh-ha, 1987). Minh-ha posits the theory of an inappropriate
other as a cultural and artistic strategy for transformative approaches
to feminine representation (Minh-ha, 1987). The moment the (artist)
woman changes her position from insider to out, she stands in an am-
biguous and complex space as neither subject nor other (Minh-ha, 1987).
This position as an inappropriate other both inhabits and confounds
liminality. It illuminates difference while subversively straddling both the
inside and the outside of coherent identities.
The moment the insider steps out from the inside, she is no longer just
an insider. She necessarily looks in from the outside while also looking
from the inside out. Not quite the same, not quite the other, she stands
in that undetermined threshold place where she constantly drifts in and
out. (Minh-ha, 1987: 3)
In this dynamic, the artist always has two gestures that of af-
firming I am like you while persisting in her difference (Minh-ha,
1987: 3). In the body of the inappropriate other, definitions of clear-cut
difference are destabilized and reinvented. The body expresses both sep-
aration and multiplicity. It is both defined and ill-defined, where bound-
aries become unstable and in the telling of her (the individual womans)
experience she knows she cannot speak of them without speaking of
herself, of history without involving her story (Minh-ha, 1987: 3).
The inappropriate other offers a feminine vehicle to meet Homi
K. Bhabhas exploration of hybridity and third space in postcolonial
discourse. Hybridity has been a highly problematic term in postcolo-
nial theory, but it has also occupied a central place within it (Meredith,
1998). Hybridity, according to Bhabha, is the process by which colonial-
ism attempts to homogenize difference by translating it into a singu-
lar translation model, but then fails producing something familiar but
new (Papastergiadis, 1997). This new, unexpected and resistant element
is what Bhabha termed third space, emerging from the interweaving
of elements of the colonizer and colonized, self and other, challenging
the validity and authenticity of any essentialist cultural identity (Mer-
139
edith, 1998). The hybrid third space complicates racial stereotyping and
negativity by subverting essentialist and oppressive discourses within and
without their own failing languages. The failure of essentialism to con-
tain the third space throws all attempts to essentialize subject-position
and identity into disrepute.
Minh-ha calls for a renegotiation of difference, difference that is
not opposed to sameness, nor synonymous with separateness (Minh-
ha, 1987: 2). Perception of difference, in this paradigm, can operate as a
mode of complex signifiers and contexts, in which it does not give rise
to conflict merely through separatism, where difference is beyond and
alongside conflict (Minh-ha, 1987: 2).
Many of us still hold on to the concept of difference, not as a tool of

creativity to question multiple forms of repression and dominance, but
as a tool of segregation, to exert power on the basis of racial and sexual
essences. The apartheid type of difference. (Minh-ha, 1987: 2)
Minh-ha insists that we refuse the presumption that an insider can
only speak with authority about their own culture (Minh-ha, 1987). Such
presumptions of exclusive and legitimized knowledge imply that the out-
sider posits himself or herself as the all-knowing subject of the outside
environment, from which the insider is essentially excluded (Minh-ha,
1987). In this dynamic, the oppressive hierarchies between us and
them, subject and object, self and other, remain. Minh-ha declares
this process as a paradoxical twist of the colonial mind (Minh-ha, 1987:
3). The insider may be granted the power of legitimacy, as long as it in-
forms the standardizing of difference between insider/out, as long as it
informs the all-knowing subject of colonial discourse (Minh-ha, 1987).
The other in this dynamic is always the shadow of the self and thus
is never concrete, never stable, never subject, never really all knowing
(Minh-ha, 1987: 3). This positioning denies the intersections of binary
recourse to facilitate suture, rupturem or new surfaces for meaning. Au-
thorship in this dynamic is concerned with the power of validation and
legitimacy that essentialist divisions such as stereotyping seem to insist
upon (Minh-ha, 1987).
A proposal for a truly resistant Feminine Semiotics then, it would
seem, requires a reading of cultural signification that embraces the plu-
140
rality of subject, destabilizing the inherent homogeneity of the sym-

bolic. Representation through an inappropriate other in this light may
lead to an alchemy of practice that is able to birth the new surfaces of
womens performance, new surfaces of the female body and psyche in
representation. Representation becomes a process of alchemy that re-
quires that artists create a ground that belongs to no one Otherness
becomes empowerment, critical difference when it is not given, but re-
created (Minh-ha, 1987: 3).
Puppetry derived from animist thinking and practice, in its own
right, facilitates meeting points of diverse elements, the purpose of
which may or may not be to intentionally render sutures in dominant
discourse, but which through their very intersections express the com-
plexity of identity today. The gesture of multiplicity inherent to the form
and meaning of puppetry holds great significance for expressing the dif-
ficult, multiplicitous and entangled pathways of South African womens
experiences and identities at play in the social, economic and political
landscapes of the country. With the global resurgence of scholarly inter-
est in puppetry, there has been a proliferation of writing that considers
why the art form holds such power and potential within the contempo-
rary creative arts and material performance. William Kentridge speaks of
the artifice of puppetry, and asks:
What is it in us that can watch a carved piece of wood, see its manipula-
tion, be aware of this the whole time and still be unable to stop seeing
a transformation of the object (Kentridge, 2001: 2).
This statement highlights the complex ambiguity of intimacy and
alienation that puppetry brings to performance. It begins to elucidate the
mechanisms of complex performance wherein the audience is simulta-
neously aware that what they are watching is a construct of the manipu-
lator, but that the puppet exists for them in and because of its materiality
and capacity for sentience (Kentridge, 2001). The subversive potential
that puppetry offers strategies of representation of the feminine is its
ability to transgress boundaries of subjectivity through the construct of
the puppet itself in relation to the body and imagination. It is also the
ability of puppetry to involve the audience in subtle ways, to contribute
to its creation through their own suspension of disbelief, that makes the
medium so effective.
141
Theorist Jane Taylor says:
Puppets can provide an extraordinary dimension to a theatrical proj-

ect because every gesture is, as it were, metaphorized. The puppet
draws attention to its own artifice, and we as the audience willingly sub-
mit ourselves to the ambiguous processes that at once deny and assert
the reality of what we watch. (Taylor, 1998: vii)
The puppet always exists through multiple levels of meaning and
signification. The puppet exists through plurality, through the interplay
of multiple bodies as a co-constructed reality between objects, perform-
ers and community. These occur in the structure, form and symbolism
of the object itself. They also manifest in the multiple bodies held in
the puppeteer/puppet relationship and then the puppet/puppeteer/
audience relationship. In many instances, more than one performer is
required to operate a puppet, so the bodies speak to multiple points of
reference operating in the singular subject. Through the body of the
performed puppet, deliberate attention is brought to the inherent multi-
plicity of being that facilitates life.
The approach to puppetry in this instance displays how multiple
levels of difference and experience can shift between the bodies of the
individual, the object and the community in the artistic process. In the
multiplicity of representation, complex identities recreate, deconstruct
and refract each other, rather than simply replicating or resisting tradi-
tional conventions. The use of puppetry allows the possibilities of ar-
tifice to co-exist with transformational sentient kinesiologies in perfor-
mance and improvisation. Puppetry has the potential to simultaneously
present and disrupt the body just as it disrupts static audience identifica-
tion with the object/subject of performance. It troubles character as well
as notions of the gaze of the audience, complicating their identifications
through patriarchal notions of sexuality and gender.
Puppetry, as the melding and meeting point of various surfaces and
bodies of meaning and construct, may be seen as representative of an
emergent third in this light. It is these multiple performing differences
that converge in the puppet that render it an inappropriate other, as that
which both expresses and confounds construct and being, visually and
critically bridging inside and outside, critique and aesthetic, binary and
142
liminality. Puppetry reveals itself as a sentient tool that simultaneously

exposes the constructs of being in the sculpted, created form (morph)
and the performing feminine body, whilst engaging in what I can only
express as a performative alchemy of presence and embodiment (forces,
power, abjection, creation and decay, sentience, emotion).
Puppetry, Animism and Resistant Femininities

There is an inaccurate assumption that puppetry as it arises in South
Arica today is derived from European art forms and that there are no
indigenous puppetry traditions in South Africa (Joubert, 2010; Kruger,
2014). This is, I believe, largely due to issues around classification, genre
and epistemological categories in western puppet-theatre. What makes
an object a puppet and what makes it a figurine, a fetish or a doll? Simi-
larly, in light of this article on the Feminine Semiotic, we may ask, what
constitutes the feminine and how are the categories of femininity cre-
ated? What limits and homogenization do these categories bring to bear
on radical identity and creative practices? Can we clearly state what a
puppet is and is not, and is this classification relevant to explorations of
resistant, subaltern feminine identity playing out in radical contemporary
animist practices?
Leading puppet theorists such as Penny Francis would argue that
what clearly distinguishes puppetry tradition as a category is that puppets
are primarily theatrical in function and are fabricated specifically to serve
in puppet theatre (Kruger, 2014). Marie Kruger writes at length about
the classification of contemporary puppetry and the difficulties of genre.
The complex strands and contemporary occurrences of puppet theatre
become entangled with other categories such object theatre, multimedia
and visual performance to name a few. Yet these categories themselves
are lightly held in the multi-textual field of performance studies, a highly
contentious and much-debated area of scholarship in which the param-
eters of classification and genre are unstable and volatile at best (Ker-
shaw, 2009).
Kruger explores Jurkowskis description that puppet theatre differ-
entiates itself from live theatre, as the main and basic features of pup-
petry are the speaking and performing objects which make use of the
physical sources of the vocal and driving powers that are present beyond
143
the object (Jurkowski, 1988, p. 31) (Kruger, 2014: 4). The concept of
the puppet as a performing figure driven by powers beyond the object
is significant in light of an exploration of the animist origins of pup-
petry. Jurkwoski writes ardently of the incorporation of puppetry and its
different social, religious and political functions in societies throughout
history. Objects, things and the matter of early man have been linked to
magic, the religious and the mimetic (Jurkowski, 1988).
Professor of history and anthropology of religion, Tord Olsson,
writes about animist ritual performance practices in Mali, Northern Af-
rica, specifically those of the Bambara, who are considered to incor-
porate their own indigenous puppetry traditions in specifically fetish-
based practices. Here the fetish-object is used to ritually conjure the
presence of persons who are now ancestors. Olsson writes about how
this creation of presence, central to fetishism and also central to puppetry,
as Jurkowski insists, is a complicated theoretical part of understanding
performance (be it in the form of entertainment, ritual or personal prac-
tice). It is this invisible presence, which allows the fetish to affect and
alter moods, social relations, bodily dispositions and states of mind
(Schieffelin, 1998 quoted in Olsson, 2013: 194). Olsson writes of a ritual
presence in Malian fetish practices and puppetry in which there is no dis-
cernment between ritual object and person, living or dead, or other-than
human, nor is there a distinction between the performer in the mask and
the mask itself. In meta ritual discourses one sometimes says that the
fetishperson arrives at his object, at other times one says that the fetish
person issues from his object (Olsson, 2013: 323).
Kruger has explored the links between ritual performance and Af-
rican puppetry tradition in her writing on the use of puppetry in the
Gelede masquerades of Yoruba communities in Nigeria and Benin. The
traditions offer entry points to multidisciplinary ritual performance,
which challenges the boundaries of traditional western puppetry prac-
tices. Krugers scholarship explores how puppets serve as agents for
the transmission and preservation of social concepts, which is done
through customary public rituals that serve both to entertain and to ex-
press social criticism and control. The puppets are used in magic-reli-
gious ceremonies and healing rituals, such as the annual Gelede festival
during the dry season. Here the boundaries between ritual and theatre
144
begin to blur, and as Kruger asserts, public puppet ritual takes the form
of theatre. This theatre serves as entertainment but also to impart and
define social roles, structures and belief systems specifically around fem-
inine procreative power.
It is significant to note that the Gelede puppetry traditions evident
in masquerade ritual performances represent what Kruger calls a highly
visible, artistic expression of the Yorubas belief in the power of women.
These puppets, which are in fact figures built on to the top of masks
used primarily in dancing, are used in service and honor of the feminine.
They are staged on every imaginable occasion, from a simple act of
housewarming to elaborate funeral ceremonies (Kruger, 2016: 3). The
Gelede performances are offered as sacrifices to honor the female elders
of the community and are also highly linked to womens procreative im-
portance. Kruger says that in this belief system, it is held that women,
particularly the elderly, possess certain extraordinary powers equal to or
greater than those of the gods and ancestors a view that is reflected in
praises acknowledging them as our mothers, the gods of society, and
the owners of the world (Kruger, 2016: 4). She explores the origins of
the word Gelede as offered by Drewal, which refers to the placation, ado-
ration and respect of womens sexual power and sexual bodies. Thus the
Gelede ritual puppetry performances form part of an elaborate worship
of the feminine and the benefit of her powers for the whole community
(Drewal, 1990 cited in Kruger, 2016: 5).
If contemporary puppets are only considered puppets if used in
occidental theatrical contexts, we begin to homogenize and limit much
more complex and politically challenging renderings of the practice.
Feminism has tackled issues of visibility and invisibility in theory and
politics, particularly by reclaiming the political spaces of the personal by
women of multiple races. Critical race and gender practitioners work-
ing with theories and processes of intersectionality such as Audre Lorde
(1997) have acknowledged the connections between personal experience
and the larger social and political structures of gender and race. Kim-
berl Williams Crenshaw has written of the necessity to recognize the
social and systemic in what was formerly perceived as isolated and in-
dividual in the identity politics of women, people of color, gays and
lesbians, or anybody considered other (Crenshaw, 1991: 1241). Thus
145
by looking only toward the public theatrical occurrences of puppetry

practice, we negate inappropriate other spaces, third spaces, where femi-
nine forms of puppetry might arise.
Womens figurine traditions arising from Southern Africa are most-
ly ignored, prescribed in general to tourist craft, womens and girls mate-
rial traditions, and loosely delegated to the personal, domestic space of
dolls. Elizabeth Dell explains the ceremonial use of fertility figures
specifically associated with feminine identity and sexual maturation in
representation across Southern Africa (1998). There seems to be a dual-
istic function of these objects. The first function serves as a socializing
play tool for young girls, allowing them to mimic their mothers breast-
feeding and nurturing (Dell, 1998). Yet dolls and childrens dolls pro-
voke difficulties in their classification because the childs fantasy gives
them special psychological functions, thus placing them on the ritualistic
and especially animistic level the endowment of life to a dead thing
(Jurkowski, 1988: 144).
Dell explores the different instances in which the figurines, often bi-
sexual in form (combining female and male symbolism) function across
the life spans of women. They do not just represent wished for babies,
but also represent women when they reach child bearing age and men-
struation, serve as tools of sexual instruction to initiates, and are used
for social education and the processes of feminine maturation. They are
also very specific tools for adult ritual performance dealing with imagi-
nation and projection. The latter can function as intermediaries be-
tween living and dead, between women and their powers to reproduce
a system of metaphorical thought centering around fertility (Dell, 1998:
13). Figurine and doll practices, such as those of the Venda in South
Africa, sit deeply and resonantly within multisexual, gender political
symbolism, feminine rites of passage and sexual knowledges that are
very hidden from masculine, western epistemologies and discourses. My
hunch is that many more politically resonant domestic puppetry ritu-
als stemming from feminine empowerment traditions survive in deeply
resilient and resistant personal practices by women in the subaltern.
South African puppetrys origins in animist creative practices pro-
vide fertile entry points into this primarily embodied art form. As I have
established, puppetry has a unique ability to facilitate an interdisciplinary
146
meeting place of construct and sentience. Animism brings to the fore

the resistant and interstitial potential of play, ritual and imagination that
feeds puppetry practices. It offers invisible entry points to play and ritual
deeply concerned with a new way of being in the world. It is the sym-
biotic potential of everything and everyone around, within, above and
below, everything with which humanity shares this universe, of form and
sentience that is the heart of animism. Animism holds open the doors
of not just an alternative resistance to the destructive segregations of
hegemonic discourse and systems, but of living awareness of the fluidity
of boundaries so crucial to revisioning identity, sexuality, self, environ-
ment and being in the 21st century. Radical feminine modes of knowing
through embodied (pro)creativity as well as dissolution, align to animist
impulses where materials of all sorts, with various and variable proper-
ties, and enlivened by the forces of the cosmos, mix and meld with one
another in the generation of things (Ingold, 2014: 294).
Secularisation has resulted in the brutal damming up of puppetrys

mainsprings of dramaturgy, which arose from the mediums natural
affinity to things spiritual, to ritual, religious ceremony, fear of the oth-
erworldly and the inexplicable Animism has been stifled, and ani-
mismis the stuff of puppetry (Francis, 2007: 7)
This statement draws us back to the non-secular, unseen and cate-
gorically ambivalent aspects of puppetry. The classification of puppetry,
when we consider its origins in magical thinking, always veers towards
a natural crossing of boundaries, an intermingling of forms, functions
and imagination.
Recently there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest in the
philosophy, concept and theories of animism and its specific occurrence
and influence across the world today (Harvey, 2014). Anthony Kubiak
describes the animistic worldview as one that is inherently performative
at its core, expressing and embodying what he calls the relational per-
sonness of all manner of entities in the world (2012). This relationality
is highly significant to the emergent third of the Feminine Semiotic in
that it expresses an interstitial place, both defined by the surfaces of
form and permeable to the forces of imagination, memory, myth, spirit,
emotion and being. Anthony Kubiak writes about a world that:
147
Is always-becoming, a world actualized and realized as process

through the performance of life. To live in such a world demands that
one be constantly alive to the place of others and otherness, that one
continually express ones respect and gratitude to Otherness itself, sim-
ply because this is what opens us out into the Other and empties the
self (Kubiak, 2012: 58)
Perhaps the problem is that the very real potential of animism is
actually something more than what we perceive with our eyes, but which
we can feel is there. This makes it critically and epistemologically volatile
and resistant to empirical discourse. Kubiak states that what is at stake
in animism is a turn away from categorical closures, subjectivities and
systematizations, favoring an awareness of becomings, of processes, of
interdependencies at the level of thought, but also at the level of experi-
ence (Kubiak, 2012: 57). Animism has been stigmatized in language
and thought as a religious belief system, but anthropologists today write
about new animism, that is animism understood in phenomenological
terms as an integrative and interrelational understanding of life, which
Tord Olsson says is inhabited by a number of persons, only some of
which are human and living (Olsson, 2013: 317).
It is this exciting potential of animism as a continuous, ever-porous
and mutable process, that expresses the inherent relationality and perme-
ability of nature and life itself. It also speaks to the flux and porousness
of categories that the Feminine Semiotics of puppetry seeks to render
present. Infused with what Kubiak calls an attitude, a stance of open-
ness, of awareness and appreciation, animism can be a conscious enact-
ment and performance. In this performance, all things can be perceived
to co-create one another in an ever-arising, unending reciprocity be-
tween entities, that allows each the space of their own unfolding, their
freedom to be (Kubiak, 2012: 58).
The Feminine Semiotic in the Living Sculpture of

Nandipha Mntambo
South African sculptor Nandipha Mntambo, in her solo exhibition The
Encounter (2009), uses her own body as a catalyst for radical animist ex-
pression, which I would consider to be a particularly Feminine Semiotic.
148
Mntambo herself has declared that the biggest misconception about her
work is that it has a feminist agenda at its core. She speaks of her interest
in pushing the boundaries of attraction and repulsion, body and materi-
ality in an interview with Natasha Madzika. She says, Ive always been
interested in challenging our understanding of boundaries, pushing that
thin line that exists between attraction/repulsion, animal/human, and
male/female. Its wonderful that my intentions are clear within how my
work is read (2012). Mntambos sculpture and imagery blurs the visual
and material boundaries of the seen and unseen, self and other, mas-
culine and feminine, western and African, through what I would like to
term living animist sculpture.
Mntambo would not classify her work as puppetry, especially as
puppetry is stigmatized as a Western craft practice. This refers back
to the stigma of puppetry as popular, rather than high art. In many
respects, female artists fight constantly to be recognized as significant
contributors to contemporary artistic practice and discourse (Aston and
Harris, 2008). In identifying a Feminine Semiotics within animist prac-
tices, I feel that it is significant to locate and identify where animism is
practiced by female artists specifically concerned with the permeability
of sexual boundaries and the multiple presences of desire, as Mntambo
herself has attested to. I do feel that there is value in recognizing and
exploring the complex feminine interplay of highly visible animist ele-
ments within Mntambos work. As a scholar and puppetry artist myself
concerned with uncovering the potential Feminine Semiotics at play in
puppetry, I offer a co-creative reading of how animism may potentially
be interpreted within Mntambos artwork.
The invocation of multiple, multi-sexual presences and persons in
Mntambos sculptures, through my own creative gaze, correlates to the
visible and invisible presences conjured in other African fetish and
puppetry traditions such as those of the Bambara and the Venda. These
presences are the foodstuffs of puppetrys non-secular and counter-epis-
temological powers. Mntambos living sculptures, in my reading of their
visceral impact, play intimately with the seen and unseen of the object-
fetish-form, invoking highly present personalities in their morphology.
It is also what I perceive as the movement of permeability, melding and
transmutation that elicits for me, as a puppetry practitioner, an awareness
149
of the living aspects evident in Mntambos sculpture. This living, artistic

gesture of permeability, in which the boundaries of self and other mu-
tate, invites the viewer as well as the artist into a creative process deeply
concerned with a new way of being in the world, a way of being where
in favour of dissolution, I enter into the other as the other enters into
me in a symbiosis (Kubiak, 2012: 57).
The boundaries of coherent masculine identity, as well as the sub-
version of the masculine, is made highly visible through Mntambos rec-
lamation and re-working of cowhide a traditional product of cattle
agriculture and patriarchal economic power. Thembisa Waetjen writes of
rural patriarchal agrarian economies implemented by the Nguni people
of South Africa where the raising, herding, and exchange of cattle in
particular, were exclusively male concerns accompanied by an elabo-
rate system of gendered taboos and rituals (2004: 37). Mntambo radi-
cally shifts and re-appropriates the symbol of the bull by intimately re-
shaping cowhide with her own naked body. In her sculptural animism,
she provides new ways of seeing multi-layered processes of being and
experience through the feminine. She invokes a cross-cultural symbol-
ism of the bull through a series of sculptures, videos and photographs
wherein her body becomes the vehicle for the revision of desire and
presence. In these sculptures, not only does Mntambo subvert traditional
patriarchal cross-cultural images, but she also reclaims the role of South
African women as the producers of living sculpture traditions. Through
her multimedia performance and sculptural works, she immerses her
own embodied, sexual presences in highly specific cross-gender, inter-
cultural images and interspecies iconographies. Mfundi Vundla (2012: 2)
writes of his encounter with the work:
One walks through the exhibition hearing multiple polyrhythmic nar-

ratives from a cowhide drum. The artists percussive voice takes us
through a range of emotions: aggression, anger, submission, self-love,
self-hate, ecstasy, the need for sanctuary in a society such as ours in
which women are too often regarded as second class citizens Mnt-
ambos feminist concerns are, in my view, tangents from the spine of
her aesthetics which possess an undercurrent of the spiritual.
In this exhibition, Mntambo hangs and positions moulds of her
150
own female body, cast in cowhide in various tableaux in the exhibition

room. These cowhide body casts are set in various actions of movement,
suspended in the moment of kinesis, which in my own reading of their
suspension is anything but static or dead. The living sculptures call pres-
ence into the body casts, inhabited by the unseen persons and other than
persons evoked in their mimetic forms. In the one tableau of sculptures
called emabutfo (the name for traditional Swazi male warriors), multiple
cowhide bodies are suspended from the ceiling in military lines. Here
Mntambo confronts the demarcation of war as male territory by revi-
sioning cultural icons of aggression and fighting through the feminized,
animist body (Vundla, 2012: 2). She does this in another sculpture, a
single cowhide cast in the shape of her body, which opens into a volu-
minous skirt surrounded by cow hooves. Entitled Nandikeshvara, the title
evokes Hindu mythology in the Sanskrit Nandi, the name of the holy
bull, which serves as the mount of the god Shiva and as the gatekeeper
of the god and goddess Shiva and Parvati. The aligning of the bull to
masculine spiritual power is reimagined in the feminine sensuality of the
image, which is cast from Mntambos naked torso, highlighting her bare
breasts. This is further articulated by the proximity of three truncated
cowhide bodies kneeling in prayer, in the presence of a huge cowhide
uMcedo, a Swazi womens fertility/pregnancy hut (Vundla, 2009: 2).
Animism, according to writer Tim Ingold, is an invitation, not to
a way of thought or discourse, but one of being alive to the world. It
requires sensitivity and responsiveness in our perceptions to the perme-
ability and change of everything around humanity (Ingold, 2013: 294). It
is also a re-membering of our inextricable interrelationship to the world
in all of her myriad occurrences, human and other-than-human. Thus,
the relationality of animism is not limited to the human being as a sepa-
rate form of existence. Mntambos imagery in my experience and un-
derstanding of the animist elements, walks these thresholds by creating
potent interspecies images and mythological personalities, which render
the unitary form of the masculine body and reality within the flux of the
Feminine Semiotic.
In a series of photographs and sculptures, Mntambo defiantly con-
fronts us as a hybrid human-animal called Europa, who then also trans-
forms into the narcissist and rapist Zeus, immortalized in a confronta-
151
tional bronze bust. These interspecies, multisexual representations are a

reworking of the ancient Greek myth of the abduction and rape of Eu-
ropa by Zeus. Mntambo merges her bare torso and head with the horns
of a bull, creating herself as a female minotaur, literally sculpting her
living flesh into a powerful interspecies expression of ferocious feminine
presence. The trauma of sexual violence enacted on Europa by Zeus is
inverted into a highly reflexive shift in their respective roles in this event.
Europa, from The Encounter Exhibition by Nandipha Mntambo, Michael

Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town 2008.
Mntambo creates an image of complex ambiguity, a third space in
which Mntambo holds both the gaze of desire and sexual aggression,
as well as the receptive body of victim and participant. In this semiotic
gesture, I interpret both the victim and the attacker within the image,
inviting the third space of the audience into a complex and intriguing
subversion of feminine vulnerability, weakness and sexual desire. In Mn-
tambos sculpture and multimedia work, I read a confrontation between
the visual and mythic borders of hegemony, of social order as well as the
body (as a microcosm of those ideologies). I also witness the ability of
sculptural form, traditionally perceived as a stationary creative process, to
152
visually and metaphorically reveal new statuses of being in the artworks

where traditional representation is exceeded by living presence. Through
this, I interpret what animism offers explorations of sexual identity, in a
powerful evocation of the third, of the unspecified and unknown within
creative practice. My writing and reception of Mntambos creations in
this light seeks out the Feminine Semiotics held within the latent ani-
mism and exploration of presence in her work.
Jill Jouberts Apple Girl
Seated Therianthrope, from Jill Jouberts Apple Girl, Cape Town 2012
The Triptych, from Jill Jouberts Apple Girl, Cape Town 2012.
153
Jill Joubert is a contemporary South African puppeteer who has been

creating, exploring and performing with puppets since the 1980s. She
was a founding member of the world-renowned Handspring Puppet
Company in the 1980s and her solo contemporary puppetry work over
the past twenty years has been showcased on prestigious platforms such
as the Institute for Creative Arts live art platform Infecting the City. I would
like to offer my own creative interpretations of the Feminine Semiotics
at play in one of her most recent productions, Apple Girl (2012), created
for Jouberts Masters degree which was co-supervised between the sepa-
rate departments of sculpture (Fine Art) and theatre (Drama) at the Uni-
versity of Cape Town South Arica. Joubert writes in her Masters Thesis
that an Italian fairy-tale of the same name inspired Apple Girl. The fairytale, she
describes, was taken specifically from a feminine folk tradition, in which
oral tradition and storytelling was held not by men but by the grand-
mothers of the community (Joubert, 2012). Joubert describes Apple Girl
as a ritualized performance that enacts metamorphosis and transforma-
tion. The piece was created as a series of performed sculptural tableaux
that took the form of various mobile shrines, which she says functioned
as mini puppet theatres (Joubert, 2012: 6). These mobile shrine/pup-
pet theatres are moved by Joubert through the performance, shaping
the space until at the end of the performance they become a constel-
lation of tableaux as an art work, fixed as an arrangement of sculptures
to which the performance has given a framework for presentation and
interpretation (2012: 6).
In informal discussions about the performance, Joubert described
to me how her own presence in Apple Girl is a performative interaction
with each shrine as a moment of ritual. I interpret Jouberts performed
rituals as a series of specified, meaningful gestures that echo the fairytale
narrative and resonate within the imaginative and critical spaces of the
Feminine Semiotic. These spaces arise for me through Jouberts use of
presence and symbolism. The ritual shrines in Jouberts performance do
this by presenting what I interpret as spatial and metaphoric moments,
framed by multicultural symbolic forms in the narrative of the reworked
fairytale.
As described in her thesis, Joubert works very closely with Afri-
can mythologies (from which a vast amount of African ritual figurines
154
are derived), feminine archetype and mythological iconographies in her

sculptural forms in Apple Girl. The threshold space that characterizes
the Feminine Semiotic emerges in my interpretation through the per-
sonal and political, sexual and spiritual landscapes that Jouberts pup-
petry invokes in Apple Girl. I read the Feminine Semiotics of her work,
not only in the transformative symbolism of the story itself but in the
presence of the living sculptures that express what Joubert describes as
her numinous appreciation of the material world, the objects of which
resonate with their many lives once lived (Joubert, 2010: 8). The found
things, built from scavenged objects, combine and recombine to form
the bodies of the living sculpture. Joubert only uses found materials to
carve and create her puppets. As in many African puppetry, mask and
figurine traditions (Joubert, 2010) she carves and combines natural, im-
permanent materials such as bones, wood and shells. The cast-off frag-
ments gathered from various places, express for Joubert the nomadic
trajectories of time, place and memory in the historical residue of the
things themselves. Importantly, Joubert writes that the objects speak as
well to the passage of time in womens sexual identity, most notably her
own rite of passage into menopause. In an interview, Joubert described
to me how she combines natural found objects such as wood and bone
with highly personal materials, such as her mothers wedding dress, her
daughters childhood clothing, items associated with the trajectory of
her own sexual and feminine cycles of life, to create transculturally meta-
phoric puppet forms.
In one of Jouberts tableau shrines, entitled The Boudoir of the Queen,
the central puppet on the altar is the figure of the infertile Queen, yearn-
ing for a child. The wooden Queen figure stands on an adapted bedside
table on wheels, with rolling pin handles (echoing cults of western femi-
nine domesticity). Deep red curtains, cut from the clothing of Jouberts
own daughters childhood, surround the table. Joubert describes the
Queen as derived from womens fertility and power icons of the snake
goddess of ancient Crete with hair carved to resemble fiery snakes,
youthful bare-breasts, small waist and flared skirt, evokes the snake-
goddess of Crete When static, the queens arms are outstretched in
the gesture of grace synonymous with the Virgin Mary (Joubert, 2010:
52). Thus, Joubert herself situates the puppet of the Queen within non-
155
secular traditions that used religious icons (catholic) and fertility figurines
(prepatriarchal) in ritual and empowerment practices.
According to Vicki Noble, a womens spirituality scholar, states that
much of the earliest art appears to have been created by women in
ritual context (Noble, 1991: 155). Nobles research is highly influenced
by the seminal work of Maria Gimbutas who wrote prolifically on an-
cient feminine art and figurine traditions. Noble aligns womens creative
and spiritual practices, which she relates to the sexual significance of
the feminine biological fertility cycle. More than this, Noble connects
womens figurine practices to sexual and creative empowerment (1991).
Jouberts reflection on fertility iconography through the carved figurine
can also be contextualized within South African fertility figurine tradi-
tions. In South Africa, fertility figures were designed to be moved, car-
ried, performed and used, rather than simply standing still on display.
The fertility doll also contained both male and female sexual forms in its
representation, in which
Embedded in its design was a narrative of denial of masculinity. The

Doll offered women the opportunity to express, celebrate or teach an
autonomous concept of female identity and fertility There is ample
evidence for womens ideological opposition to the patriarchy. (De-
deren, 2010: 34)
The fertility figurine brings resistant and subversive practices into
womens rites of passage and matrilineal inheritance. Dederen says that
many of the fertility dolls of these traditions may be seen to express
an autonomous feminine perspective of procreation, a feminized render-
ing of sexuality that served as an alternative to the masculine vision of
sexual complementarity (2010: 36).
Dederen writes a significant feature is often the dual sexual nature
of the icons, which contain references to the sexual identity of both
men and women. Dederen looks at the latent feminine empowerment
oft-ignored in the Tsonga marriage figurine traditions in the Limpopo
province of South Africa. Many researchers simply dismiss their impor-
tance by attributing their purposes as reminders of the sanctity of mar-
riage to newlyweds and, by implication, the male privileging patriarchal
156
systems surrounding them. But rather than the doll being referred to as
a child (nwana) by women, it is also called xanga and tshutshu, words that
hold great significance in women-led lineage traditions. The xanga figu-
rine arises in complex ways through the tshutshu practices, which situate
women as keepers of matrilineal descent and feminine ancestral mean-
ing. Held only by the female line, this living figurine offers significance
for the maintenance of feminine power, education and representation
within Venda society.
As Dederen points out, the doll provides women with a powerful
tool to symbolically weaken the patriarchy of their society (2010). The
fertility figurine can be seen to hold a deeply resistant feminine presence,
subversive of patriarchal power, specifically as it arises in personal prac-
tices and spaces. While this subversive potential may not have been ex-
plicitly revealed in public, in the secret and sacred traditions of feminine
initiations their use and perception was linked specifically to the sexuality
and pride of the women.
In Apple Girl, the queen laments her inability to conceive in a public
way, but the presence of her own fertility and feminine power is held in
the symbols on her body as well as symbols present yet hidden from the
view of the audience. Joubert (2010: 51) describes the tableaux world, as
well as the figure of the Queen puppet, as filled with symbols of fertility,
expressing her yearning desire to bear a child:
As the boudoir of the queen is wheeled into the performance, Craw-

ford sings the queens lament, with words taken directly from Calvino,
punctuated by the puppet raising her arms in varied gestures of sup-
plication, epiphany and despair.
Oh! Oh! Oh!
Oh! Oh! Oh!
Oh! Oh! Oh!
Oh why cant I bear children the same as the apple tree bears apples?
157
Oh why cant I bear children the same as the apple tree bears apples?
Oh! Oh! Oh!

Yet, Joubert describes how inside the closed drawer of the table on
which the queen stands, there are fertility symbols (spiral snakes, cosmic
eggs, and a labyrinth with a vulva), which she describes as attached to
the little cupboard like a silent prayer (Joubert, 2010: 51). The hidden
prayers within the shrine express a symbolism of feminine procreativity
in a secretive way, which echoes the ways in which fertility figures have
been and are used by women in their personal experiences of desire and
fertility as described by Dederen above. In my own creative reading of
the symbolism in Jouberts piece, these hidden fertility symbols express
the sexual power and creative force of the queen, as she does in fact
manage to conceive a daughter, called Apple Girl. My interpretation
links the queen in Jouberts performance to South African fertility doll
practices, specifically through the intimate ways that the symbolism of
fertility and the fertility figures hold presence (visible and invisible) for
individuals. The personal intimacy of the fertility figure, which gathers
meaning and power in womens secret spaces is a potential locus of its
resistance as a Feminine Semiotic.
In the ritual performance of Apple Girl, Joubert enters multiple
feminine imaginative and animist bodies and spaces. The evocations of
personal myth in the ritual objects she creates express transformative
rites of passage into and through womanhood, sexuality, and personal
metamorphosis that the storys archetypes express. One of the most sig-
nificant of the ritual tableaux in Apple Girl is what Joubert calls The Altar,
a large constructed wooden box that houses three sculpted figures. The
figures combine and revise specifically pre-patriarchal and pre-western
fertility and power icons such as the bisexual ancestral Khoi San therian-
thrope from South African rock art. The second sculpture references the
Venus of Willendorf (a fertility icon from prehistoric European art) built
out of tortoise bones. The third is based on the Senufo (Ivory Coast)
sculpture of Kono, the ancestral bird-woman made from pigs scapulas.
These figures are present throughout the performance, overseeing the
unfolding events and witnessing them within the multisexual presence
of the sacred feminine.
158
Joubert speaks of the therianthrope, a gender-ambiguous figure

derived from San rock paintings found in South Africa, which she says
suggests
An ancestral inter-connectedness between humans and animals This

numinous figure is intended to be sexually ambiguous, representing the
enviable state of balance in which gender is no longer relevant: the
breasts and horns could be either male or female and the cowrie shell
suggests a navel or a vagina. (Joubert, 2012: 44)
This sexual ambiguity and bisexuality is seen in many other tra-
ditional South African fertility figurines, for example the Sotho Ngoa-
na Modula (child of grass) or the Ntwane fertility dolls called Gimwane,
where the figure has a phallic shape but is covered in the feminine tradi-
tions and symbolism of beadwork. These gender-ambiguous figurines,
far from making gender irrelevant, potentially derive from bilineal, pre-
patriarchal heritage in which shared power between sexes was expressed
through the sexual potency of these figures (2010: 27). Dederen goes so
far as to suggest that the feminized phallic image would have redefined
manhood as a mere tool for the realization of female identity, the ul-
timate power of woman to hold the mysteries of life and procreation,
menstruation and death that is the complex process of feminine fertility
and lineage (2010: 36).
These meanings would also have taken their full significance in
the actual performance of ritual, extending beyond the figure itself and
highlighting the acutely permeable surfaces of separation between self
and other. In the liminal states of womens sacred performance, the figu-
rine is integral to flux, power, protection, embodiment, and spirit of the
rite of passage. As Dederen points out, the figurine would also have in-
novated and changed over the centuries, but always serving as reminder
and representation of the womb where in the sphere of human procre-
ation, female sexual potency rules supreme (2010: 37).
The triptych altar in Apple Girl is situated not only as a centerpiece
for reclamation of feminine power, but also operates as limen, a per-
meable symbolic entranceway between the shifting forces of sexuality,
power, spirit and material. Minh-ha declares that the artists job is to
159
bring forward and open the realms of the visible and invisible (1987). It
is both the visibility and invisibility of what she terms the inappropriate
other that could pose a transformative strategy for representation. Here,
one would have to break with such a system of dualities and show
what constitutes invisibility itself as well as what exceeds mere visibility
(Grzinic, 1998: 3). On Jouberts performance altar, the therianthrope, the
ancestral bird woman, and the Venus inhabit a liminal space, that is they
are both in the world and between worlds, here and elsewhere simultane-
ously. Minh-ha uses the terms elsewhere and within here, align-
ing identity representation with the destabilization of time and space
(Grzinic, 1998: 3). The destabilization of time and space by the gender-
ambiguous figure of the therianthrope and the interspecies form of the
bird woman operate to question, to celebrate, and to corrode the fixed-
ness of the subject in the here and now.
I read the Feminine Semiotics of animism in Jouberts living sculp-
tures, as expressed in the melding points of form and construct, ritual
and performance, myth and metaphor, personal and political in her cre-
ative meaning making. It is these multiple layers that converge in the
puppet as what Joubert calls performed sculpture (2010: 27), that
render it an inappropriate other in my understanding. This permeable
and threshold place of the puppet, in my reading of it, both expresses
and confounds construct and being, visually and critically bridging the
inside and the outside, seen and unseen, the critical and the embodied.
Conclusion
The Feminine Semiotics of the inappropriate other arises in artistic prac-
tice in ways that, as Minh-ha declares, exceed the limits while working
within them (Grzinic, 1998). The emergent third space of animist pres-
ence at the heart of womens puppetry works in complex ways, which, as
I have explored, to quote Minh-ha, are simultaneous and always inex-
haustive (Grzinic, 1998). This borderline, in-between space of animism
is what Sara Motta describes as the state of potential and possibility that
is alive in the feminizing of resistance through creative practice (2014).
Motta locates this in the figure of the storyteller. She writes,
160
The storyteller dwells out of choice in the margins when as a self that is
oppressed, she makes a choice at the crossroads of these two states and
ethically commits to politicize this in-betweenness The storyteller
thus does not seek aesthetic, epistemological, and cultural separation
from, or control over, the popular. The storyteller imbues the embod-
ied experiences of oppressions with epistemic power She commits
to practices that decenter dominant literacies by reclaiming, recovering,
and reinventing the knowledges of the body, heart, and land. (Motta,
2014: 12)
The interstitial space of the storyteller/artist that Motta describes
exists specifically in her co-creative, communal re-imagining of being
and that is deeply imbricated in, rather than separated from, the em-
bodied personal and collective experience of history, spatiality, cosmol-
ogy, culture, and social relations (Motta, 2014: 12). The storyteller co-
constructs meaning through collective re-weaving that breaks down the
boundaries of her own narrow identifications with self as well as the
monolithic, self/other epistemologies of hegemony. In womens con-
temporary resistance practices, puppetry proffers an entry point to a co-
constructive strategy of creativity that is located in a deeply feminine
multigeneity of being.
Animism expresses the syncretic, multidisciplinary and energetic
potential of radical cultural and representational practice. Confluences
of ritualized liminality, syncretism and experiential slippage through
embodiment, exist at the heart of womens puppetry performance con-
cerned with animism. These expressions are key to the feminized resis-
tance of this inappropriate other of creative practice in South Africa as
well as elsewhere in the world. What this ever-evolving art form offers
the landscape of radical as well as materialist subaltern feminist enquiry
is an artistic strategy of spiritual and sexual resistance to western patriar-
chal oppression. What I hope this exploration of the feminine semiotics
of animism has begun to reveal, is how the intimately feminine creative
impulse expressed through puppetry may be linked to the feminization
of resistance and emergent processes of being in the threshold spaces
of the subaltern.
161
I am aware, as a South African artist, of the stigmatization and in-

visibility of womens puppetry, not only in our own country, but in how
this perception is echoed in global performance practices (Obraztsov,
1967). This particular stigma has, to a large extent, excluded puppetry by
shaming it as womens practice directed at the immature and excluding
it from high art discourses. Part of this is due to the occidental assump-
tion that the roots of modern puppetry practice aimed at adults and a
critical audience, stem from masculine modernist and postmodern tradi-
tions. Focus is primarily afforded to the intersecting patriarchal traditions
of European, Mediterranean and Asian intercultural exchanges. There
is little or no critical awareness of how these traditions arose histori-
cally in colonial and patriarchal imperatives that marginalized the femi-
nine. Much of European puppet-object theorizing has sought critical
substantiation, integrating the modus operandi of the puppet within the
agency of the object in a specifically modernist discourse. This fearful
de-feminizing and de-sexualizing of the energetic and sentient roots of
puppetry in critical discourse, has done much to limit critical expression
of the subversive, phenomenological heart of the practice and what this
means for sexual and spiritual resistance. Yet it is the radical feminine at
the heart of puppetry that offers so many of the discursive strategies
for resistance that emerge in its contemporary performance applications.
The radical syncretism of the feminine resides in its liminality, at
the threshold of form and sprit, sentience and construction, being and
desire. The Feminine Semiotics of contemporary animism express sexu-
al and spiritual emergence (as a process of ecstatic becoming, rising up)
and emergency (as a call to address the ravages of patriarchal cultural
and political domination) through complex representation of the per-
meability of being. This threshold space of flux and intersection heralds
the imminent challenge of the inappropriate third to multiple sites of
oppression and containment that operate to denounce the truly resis-
tant practices of feminine creativity. Yet, in the intimate, often personal
spaces of dolls, ritual, living sculpture, presence, symbol, slippage and
embodiment that form aspects of womens puppetry practices today, we
may find expression that provides a feminized strategy for r-evolutionary
creative practices.
162
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166
PADINI NIRMAL QUEERING RESISTANCE, QUEERING RESEARCH:
Queering Resistance, Queering

Research:
In Search of a Queer Decolonial
Feminist Understanding of Adivasi
Indigeneity1
Padini Nirmal
Clark University, US
Abstract
In this paper, I place both the methodological and epistemological realms of my
doctoral research with the Adivasis (indigenous peoples) of Attappady, Kerala
under a queer decolonial feminist lens in order to better understand the nature
of contemporary Adivasi indigeneity, and indigenous resistance. Given Keralas
unique position within India as a communist state, often acting in the interest of
global capitalism by implementing neoliberal polices and steering state-led develop-
ment plans, its Adivasis are already queer in their relationship to the state as
non-modern others. In order to understand the often contradictory and complex
relationship of the Adivasi with the communist-neoliberal state, beyond being
the marginal other, I mobilize a queer decolonial feminist framework, through
a process I term queering. I use queering to critically examine and analyze con-
temporary indigeneity and indigenous resistance in two stages. Firstly, through
1
The author would like to gratefully acknowledge the National Science Foundation
and the American Institute of Indian Studies for their dissertation research funding
support. The author would also like to thank resource persons at the National
Archives of India, and the Tamilnadu State Archives for their support and efforts.
This paper would not have been possible without the invaluable contributions
of the research participants, the guidance of Manoj and family, and the support-
ive feedback of two anonymous reviewers and the special issue editors. Last, but
significantly, this paper was greatly enriched by comments and suggestions made
by Alex Sphar, Nirmal Selvamony, and Kavin Paulraj, and the guidance of Jody
Emel and Dianne Rocheleau.
167
a broad analysis of the coloniality of development and its material effects on

Adivasi lands resulting in land struggles. Secondly, through a narrower focus on
gender and sexuality to show how queering is also useful in understanding the
operation of particular modalities of power. In doing so, I argue that queering
reveals the latent structural complexities of Adivasi indigeneity by drawing causal
links between systematic processes of land loss and land alienation, material live-
lihood, and structural changes in various domains, including gender, sexuality,
spirituality and health. I also argue that emergent and existing modalities of
Adivasi resistance, despite the forms they take, are in fact epistemological and
ontological acts of decolonial resistance against the combined coloniality of capital-
ism, development and modernity on their ancestral lands.
I. Introduction: The Problem of Unqueered

Adivasi Materiality
Indias particularly complex socio-cultural history, its multiple diversi-
ties, and its experience of European colonialisms has had temporally and
spatially diverse impacts on its Adivasi (indigenous) populations. Both
the British colonial state and the postcolonial Indian state have oscillated
between policies of assimilation/integration, and those of isolation with
regard to the Adivasis. The current postcolonial Indian state, following
its predecessors, has instituted several policies to ensure the parallel de-
velopment of Adivasi populations alongside mainstream society, in an
effort to recognize and address their socio-cultural and economic differ-
ences. State policy is thus aimed at mainstreaming, i.e., systematically
transforming Adivasis from passive state subjects to full citizens. This
process of mainstreaming through development policies has had various
impacts on Adivasi lives and livelihoods that are best described as be-
ing colonial. Such policies create and sustain conditions of coloniality
through state-led and state-supported development planning, as well as
their associated capital relations. In an effort to make these multiple con-
ditions of coloniality visible, I employ decolonial lenses colored by queer
and feminist theories in an analytical process I term queering. Queering, in
this paper, thus works to expand current understandings of indigene-
ity in India by showing how the very understanding of difference upon
which Adivasi indigeneity is embedded in a deeply colonial and coloniz-
168
ing power relation. This in turn leads to continuing contestations over

indigenous identity and the related notions of land relations and politics.
Following complex patterns of colonial and postcolonial state man-
agement of Adivasis, current state policies have a twofold and contradic-
tory goal of integration and isolation. On the one hand, state policies
consist of mechanisms of integration aimed at transforming Adivasis
into full citizens of the state (via development policies). On the other,
they consist of mechanisms of isolation that maintain their subaltern
status (via policies of socio-cultural and ecological preservation). Queering
state policies by critically analyzing their impacts on the ground through
a decolonial feminist perspective reveals that these contradictory goals
often collide, resulting in development policies creating a state of depen-
dence rather than empowerment, and conservation policies supporting
industrial growth rather than socio-ecological preservation. I use the fol-
lowing example to show how queering works to expose latent contradic-
tions and connections that, when visible, complicate and enrich present
understandings of Adivasi indigeneity.
An article in a leading national newspaper, Alcoholic tag causes
hurt to tribal victims, published on August 3, 2013, states that various
politicians blamed young mothers of Attappady for not eating prop-
erly and branded them alcoholics, saying their habits led to the death of
their children. Infant deaths attributed to severe neonatal and prenatal
malnutrition have been rising in Attappady, and reached a particular high
in 2015, when all of the leading national newspapers carried several sto-
ries on the issue (Maternal under-nutrition cause of infant deaths in At-
tappady: study, 2013; Philip, 2014; Rajagopal, 2013a, 2013b; Shaji, 2015;
Suchitra, 2014). The Kerala government issued a statement identifying
lack of effective implementation of health packages and malnutrition
as the major cause of tribal infant deaths in Attappady on March 10,
2015 (Malnutrition major cause of tribal infant deaths: Kerala govern-
ment, 2015).
The policy solution to these infant deaths thus far has been to in-
crease monetary aid to the effect of 500 crore rupees (roughly US$75
million), according to one estimate, and state services such as food ra-
tions and health clinics to ensure the availability of nutrients and health-
care. Despite the increase in these symptomatic solutions little attention
169
is paid to addressing root causes. Several activists and community lead-

ers reject the narrative of alcoholism among pregnant women, drawing
media and state attention instead to the fact that such malnutrition is a
direct outcome of the rupture in traditional agricultural practices of the
communities.
For instance, on September 22, 2015 in Death Stalks Attappady
Babies, a local Adivasi NGO employee is quoted as saying:
Long term solutions like restoring the alienated agricultural lands and
providing them with basic irrigation still remain on paper. Group farm-
ing projects focusing on pulses and millets are yet to be initiated. Short-
term measures including providing of nutritious meals are a myth,
mainly due to lack of coordination, corruption and sheer indifference
of the officials.
This statement identifying land alienation as the root cause of the
rise in infant mortality in Attappady evoked much anger and was sub-
sequently dismissed as the ranting of a Naxalite, or internal terror-
ist (Rajagopal, 2013b). At first glance, land alienation and dispossession
might not seem to have a direct causal link to rising infant mortality. Yet,
an analysis at the ontological level reveals the ways in which the ontolo-
gies and epistemologies that ground Adivasi land relations are not only
misunderstood, but also how their fractured understanding seriously di-
minishes the political agency of the Adivasi, at the same time creating
critical challenges to their very survival. While a surface-level analysis
shows how the mismatch between local needs and state solutions indi-
cates the inadequacy of state development policy and planning, queering
(whose workings I detail in the later sections of this paper) makes the
underlying epistemological and ontological rupturing visible, therefore
allowing a more nuanced understanding of Adivasi materiality.
The analytical process of queering employs a relational understand-
ing of difference to challenge binary conceptions of identity, therefore
exposing the relative nature of marginality, borders and boundaries on
the one hand, and fundamentally questioning how power comes to be
crystallized in certain spaces, on the other. In doing so, it brings togeth-
er queer theorys critique of normativity and binaries, with decolonial
170
theorys critique of power from the vantage point of modernity and co-
loniality. Queering is thus situated theoretically within a queer decolonial
feminist framework that borrows from queer and feminist theories, in-
digenous studies (including native studies), and decolonial theory (both
produced/enacted by resistance movements/indigenous peoples, and
theorizations of decoloniality from within the academy). I employ this
tool in order to understand, a) the nature of contemporary indigeneity
at the nexus of coloniality and modernity, and b) the politics of contem-
porary indigeneity along multiple lines of difference by undertaking a
critical study of the workings of power and resistance. In the following
sections, I show how queering does this by combining a decolonial per-
spective that reveals the coloniality of indigeneity, with a queer feminist
perspective that makes visible multiple hierarchies of power and their
modalities of operation, while fundamentally questioning the categories
of difference used by the state (among other placeholders of power). To
do so, I draw from feminist ethnographic research conducted between
2010 and 2016 involving over 85 individual and group narrative inter-
views of Adivasis, rural settlers, government and NGO employees, and
land activists.
In the following section, Theorizing Queering: Crafting A Queer Decolonial
Feminist Framework, I outline the conceptual basis of the QDF framework
by delving into queer, decolonial, and feminist theories, as well as their
intersections, showing how this framework can be deployed as an analyti-
cal tool in its form as queering. In the third section, A Note On Methodology:
Queering And Decolonizing Research, I describe the methodological basis of
my research in an effort to show both its role in queering, and contextualize
the origins and nature of my research and its particularities. In the fourth
section, Queering Contemporary Adivasi Indigeneities, I use queering to critically
examine and analyze contemporary indigeneity and indigenous resistance
in two stages. First, through a broad analysis of the coloniality of develop-
ment and its material effects on Adivasi lands resulting in land struggles,
and secondly, through a narrower focus on gender and sexuality to show
how queering is also useful in understanding the operation of particular
modalities of power. In both, I use examples from my recent and ongoing
ethnographic research in Attappady. Finally, in the fifth section, Some Queer
Thoughts that Persist, I offer a brief overview of my analysis, and end with
some lingering questions.
171
II. Theorizing Queering: Crafting a Queer

Decolonial Feminist Framework
Decolonial theory offers a dynamic, evolving and ever expanding politi-
cal space to decolonize feminist, queer and indigenous studies. Being an
active destabilizer of structures and enactments of power, decolonial
theory enriches and enlivens queer theory, and this coupling is central to
imagining and realizing the theory and politics of this paper. In fact, the
organic mobility of ideas between the realms of feminist, queer, indig-
enous, and native studies enriches each of these fields. In the following
section, I elaborate one such dialogue between these three dynamic fields
by presenting a queer decolonial feminist (QDF) framework which, by
being a modality of resistance itself, offers a strong foundation for study-
ing Adivasi resistance. In what follows, I show how queering operates by
analyzing both the content and process of this research, examining how
contemporary Adivasi indigeneity is produced and exists at the nexus
of multiple identities, oppressions and liberations through continuing
colonial processes. In so doing, queering operates within decolonial spaces
of resistance that it helps to create. It takes colonialism as one among
many structures that produce varying negative impacts on indigenous
bodies and beings, while simultaneously recognizing the agency of the
indigenous person as a producer of decolonial knowledges and political
agency, rather than a complicit, passive, non-citizen frozen within their
forest by popular, colonial, statist discourse. It does so by a) exposing
the coloniality inherent in constructing indigenous peoples as marginal
beings living within marginal spaces, instead positioning them within
the center in active decolonial spaces where the constructed othering of
the indigenous becomes evident, and b) recognizing and affirming in-
digenous agency, while simultaneously offering a wider, more inclusive
framework that recognizes the multiplicity of indigenous experiences,
politics, and ideas.
Queer Decolonial Feminism and Queering

Queer theory emerged from the political work of those striving for di-
versity in, and inclusion of, non-binary genders and sexualities. It has
since worked to expand the otherwise heteronormative bounds of femi-
172
nist movements and theories by productively complicating and challeng-

ing ideas and structures of power, including, but not limited to, those
related to gender and sexuality. I draw on three ideas here: of difference,
margins/boundaries/borders, and power, in order to show how queer
theory can be used to contextualize the concept of indigeneity within
broader regimes of power (see Chen, 2012 for a skillfully crafted analysis
employing queer theory in a different context).
Indigeneity is usually embedded in a regime of power in which
indigenous peoples are defined legally/analytically (the other defi-
nition), practically/strategically (the self-definition), and/or collectively
(the global in-group definition) (Niezen, 2003: 19). While one might
already be indigenous by definition, indigeneity is mobilized as a dis-
tinct political identity/category by becoming indigenous. Becoming
indigenous is always only a possibility negotiated within political fields of
culture and history (Cadena and Starn, 2007: 13). Indigeneity is thus
often construed as a continuous process whereby being indigenous
translates into becoming indigenous through various practices and
performances (Sundberg, 2011) including political participation, resis-
tance, cultural ceremonies, etc. Indigenous politics thus serve as a site
of identity-making. But as identity is embedded ontologically in land,
indigenous politics are also a site of the decolonization of land, ideas,
and identity.
In several state societies, indigenous politics are constructed on the
basis of their difference: from the settler in settler colonial contexts, and
from state-society in other contexts (of internal colonialism, as in the
Indian case). In most of these cases, public and private narratives relating
to the indigenous see them as less-than, behind, backward, or primitive,
in comparison with the rest of society. Such views become solidified in
patronizing state policies that construct the indigene as passive, help-
less, hapless, and often as the feminine other. Simon Bignall (2007), in
reflecting upon the problematic notion of difference as it is expressed in
multicultural, postcolonial societies writes that:
Difference is reified as the compelling or causal force of critical trans-

formation, but simultaneously treated as the problematic absence, lack
or disadvantage that must be eventually resolved or dissolved, as soci-
173
ety reconciles its differences and forges unity and equality (in Hickey-
Moody and Palins, 2007: 200).
Queer theory offers a way beyond this paradoxical moment in
which a negative conception of difference is seen as both the problem
and the solution where politics become organized around erasing such
differences (and result in top-down development policies, for instance).
In contrast, queer theory harnesses difference as a positive force to con-
struct an affinity politics that fractures hierarchies of exploitative and
oppressive power, which recognize some things as normal and others
as anomalous/abnormal.
While queerness is about being on the margins, or being outside the
center (Anzalda, 1987), by design it also challenges the making of such
margins and boundaries along lines of difference. Gloria Anzalda (in
Moraga and Anzalda, 1983) writes that queer groups pose a threat to
the operation of power-as-usual by not fitting-in squarely with the world,
and that while queer groups are united by their queerness, they are not
without internal differences. While marginality may serve as an organiz-
ing tool for queer politics, queer theory works to expose marginalization
as an intentional, socio-cultural-political process that reflects the inequal-
ities and injustices created by the unevenness of power. By doing so, it
fractures spaces where power difference comes to be crystallized (for
instance, in race, ethnicity, nationhood, gender and sexuality, Anzalda,
1987; Jagose, 1996; Mohanty, 1988) as unchanging self-evident eternal
truths, thus making room for resistance and transformation.
Queer theory also shares a political space with feminist theory,
drawing heavily from the theory of intersectionality, which examines
how gender intersects with different identities to produce different ex-
periences of privilege and oppression (Collins, 2000). While feminist
theory questions the operation of power as it relates to the structural
operation of gender, it also critically examines places and spaces where
power is located and becomes entrenched. It is thus able to scrutinize
the structures that govern society at individual and collective levels in an
intersectional perspective. A critical feminist theory combining critical
race theory with queer theory creates a liberatory politics that envisions
marginal spaces as sites of political resistance and transformation. It can
174
therefore challenge marginality, difference, and the operation of power

in the context of indigeneity not only by exposing histories of structural
oppression and systematic marginalization, but also by critically examin-
ing the body politics of being indigenous (at the individual level, in rela-
tion to gender and sexuality for instance; and at the communal level, in
relation to indigenous politics and resistance).
Yet, queer theory, even when strengthened by queer of color and
feminist critiques, often erases the indigene, politically crippling the in-
digenous subject by not engaging seriously with coloniality and colonial
histories (Smith, 2010: 5253). To address this problem, it is necessary
to critically engage with decolonial theory in conjunction with queer and
feminist theories, not only because decolonial theories expose the link-
ages between coloniality and gender/sexuality (Canfield, 2009; Smith,
2010), but also because their political space can be stretched and com-
plicated by indigeneity. This can be achieved in many ways, for instance,
by recognizing the persistence of Indigenous concepts and epistemolo-
gies (Arvin et al., 2012: 21); engaging with Two-Spiritedness (possessing
both male and female spirits, and transcending the male/female binary)
to rethink queer studies; and/or questioning whether decolonial strug-
gles and indigenous beings and histories are a part of the intellectual and
political consciousness generated by such a perspective (Driskill et al.,
2010: 78). Using queer theory thus does not disrupt its intimate politics,
but instead bolsters its political potential by analytically challenging, not
reinforcing, coloniality in the indigenous context (see Finley in Driskill
et al., 2011).
To this end, decolonial theory can be employed to broaden feminist
and queer critiques of power by examining how coloniality and moder-
nity operate as two sides of the same coin (Grosfoguel, 2007; Qui-
jano, 2000), constructing unequal socio-political-cultural structures that
maintain marginality and difference, especially among the indigenous.
The project of decolonization, then, is a project of resistance to the
conjoined operations of modernity/coloniality and, as such, a negation
of the marginality and difference that it coproduces. Concurrently, while
decoloniality acts as a resistant, destructive force, it is also a construc-
tive force that rethinks, rewrites and repoliticizes worlds (in plural) by
engaging in decolonial meaning-making processes (Mignolo, 2011: 46).
175
Decolonial theory, therefore, complicates and expands the very defini-

tion of history, theory, and truth, in a general sense, by challenging the
universalism of occidental history and Eurocentric thinking, and rec-
ognizing multiple world-making processes as theory, and by presenting
these other theories (ontologies and epistemologies) as equitable, based
on a positive, horizontal plane of difference (Alfaisal, 2011; Hokowhitu,
2009; Smith, 2012; Walsh, 2012).
As a perspective that brings together lessons from queer, feminist
and decolonial theories, the queer decolonial feminist (QDF) framework
allows for a conjoined study of both power and resistance focusing on
the most marginal, seeing the place where power is most felt, and there-
fore containing the greatest possibility of resistance, as the beginning of
politics. As radical feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe says, to study how
power operates, we must always start at the bottom and then study up the
line of power (personal conversation, November 2015). Beginning thus,
a QDF framework also challenges ways of seeing, knowing and structur-
ing the world normalized by the colonial/modern imperial project, by
fundamentally questioning how western thought has come to explain
and construct a singular world. In other words, through its critiques of
epistemic and ontological hierarchies, including those of asymmetric
ignorance (Chakrabarty, 1992: 2), this framework challenges the very
power hierarchies along which the modern world has come to be built
through colonialism and its associated operatives, hiding within itself the
existence of many other worlds. The decolonial project, strengthened by
feminist and queer interventions then, is not about border crossing but
about shape shifting borders themselves. In such a moment, the indigene
becomes visible as an active political agent rather than a passive subject,
operating within a shifting, changing space of marginality (or queerness).
Drawing from this framework, I use queering as an agentive force to
decouple and destabilize normative forms of power and control at the
intersection of coloniality and modernity. In other words, I engage in a
queer analysis of the project of decolonization.
176
III. A Note on Methodology: Queering and

Decolonizing Research
The broad goal of this research is to better understand the complex
nature of contemporary indigeneity in India, by examining its structural
and ontological relationships to land and resistance. This paper draws
from two sets of field research conducted in Attappady, Kerala: pre-dis-
sertation 20102015 (about 8 months) and dissertation research in 2016,
which is presently ongoing (6 months). I engage in a place-based ethno-
graphic study visiting 82 of 187 hamlets, conducting over 85 individual
and group interviews (~ 40 percent female) in Malayalam, Tamil and
English with members of the Irular, Mudugar, Kurumbar Adivasi com-
munities, rural settler families, local government officials, forest, educa-
tion and tribal department officials, Adivasi and non-Adivasi land rights
activists, and NGO workers. In order to understand how ontologies of
land, and histories and geographies of land, mediate and construct con-
temporary indigeneity (which includes indigenous politics), I employ the
narrative interview method to learn about land ontologies, with inter-
views typically ranging between 45 minutes to 2.5 hours.
The origins of this study are in scholar-activism: while volunteering
with a digital community archiving project in Attappady in 2010, I was
told by members of two Adivasi communities that their everyday lives
had been greatly disrupted by the sudden and growing appearance of
windmills on their supposedly protected lands (as a part of Indias green
energy initiative). Knowing I was a nascent researcher, they suggested I
study the various development projects underway (dam-building, min-
ing), to expose contradictions between their wants and the states needs
(Field notes, 2010). I thus began such a study, which has since evolved
into a critical examination of their land struggles and politics in a histori-
cal frame.
The studys methodological grounding, however, emerged later on,
when faced with having to marry academic rigor with scholar-activism.
Drawing from ethnographic methods in anthropology and lessons in
feminist research praxis (Harding, 1987) and indigenous studies, I de-
veloped the following method in conjunction with the QDF framework,
as an exercise in decolonization. By creating space to position respect,
177
honor and humility centrally within the research process, and by seeing
research into the politics of indigeneity as a form of critical resistance
in itself, my aim is to decolonize research, following L. T. Smith (2012).
In taking lessons from decolonial theorists seriously, this approach sees
ontologies and theories shared during interviews as equally valid way of
understanding the world (Nirmal, 2016), accepting morality and spiri-
tuality as governing principles (Deloria Jr., 1994; Waters, 1995; Cajete,
2000), and seeing ontology as a historically specific political and scientific
knowing of the world. In other words, what I present below is a method
involving ontological and epistemological understandings drawn from
my research and my own social-world.
Stalker (2011) writes of the simultaneous construction of episte-
mological and ontological narratives of the researcher and the research,
whereby the researchers own world-making merges with those of the
research subjects. While I am bound by own epistemological narratives,
they are influenced by how I come to know and understand the world
ontologically. I reconcile my thus cultivated partial perspective (Har-
away, 1988) informed by my particular positionality, identity and context,
with the theoretical QDF lenses I have chosen to employ, seeing research
as:
a) a relational encounter between two differently queered subjects

that of this brown female researcher within a largely white academy,
and that of indigenous peoples and their allies within a predominantly
nonindigenous world; b) a practice of solidarity that takes seriously
indigenous epistemologies and methods, emphasizing a collective and
relational knowledge production within living worlds. By taking into ac-
count the power differences between researcher and research subjects,
this method emphasizes reflexivity and respect in all research settings
(Nirmal, 2016).
In order to recognize and acknowledge how my particular posi-
tionality conditions the research process, I make the different worlds
I inhabit known, that of North America and South India, and how I
am situated in both of these spaces (as a student, teacher, friend, ally,
researcher, etc.). I physically, and theoretically, travel back and forth be-
178
tween what Paola Bacchetta (2010) calls the global northwest and, to
follow from her, the global southeast in terms of identity, language,
and ideas. Here, I see doing QDF research as not imposing ideas and
representations from the northwest, but engaging with contextually pro-
duced ideas on their own terms, where research itself serves as a space
for decolonization (Nirmal, 2016).
I position the entirety of my research within such a space: a space of
queerness, where the researcher, the researched, and the research itself are
queered by difference in their marginalities, oppressions, and liberations,
and united by the common goal of decolonizing understandings and
experiences of indigeneity. Within this space of queerness it becomes pos-
sible to question the ways in which marginality comes to be constructed,
and recognize the agency of each entity in relation to the other. The space
of queerness, in my analysis, accommodates multiple marginal positions,
serving as an inclusive, shifting space of borderlands, and thus offers
a more complex, less rigid understanding of contemporary indigeneity
and indigenous resistance in Attappady. As a relational, decolonial zone,
it allows the centering of previously marginal beings and ideas by recog-
nizing both the shifting nature of marginality whereby the marginal is
often within, and sometimes alongside the center, and the operation of
marginality as a modality of resistance.
Within this space, I first situate myself as a morally and politically
engaged, open, thinking subject. Hence, I use open signifiers instead
of fixed categories (see Sundberg, 2011) exploring what indigenous,
Adivasi, and research, etc. mean in the context of this study (that
is, I queer what each of these mean, contextually). In doing so, I work at
being an active observer, rather than a passive researcher engaging with
the communities in question on their own terms. That is, I recognize
my partial perspective as one that is cultivated both consciously and
subconsciously within my own socio-political context as a young female
member of the Indian middle-class, evident both in my choice of ques-
tions and interpretations of answers. In order to be in solidarity with
the Adivasis who participate in this research, I try to step in and out
of my own perspectival limits by situating my positionality and identity
in relation to theirs, and in moments of misunderstanding, asking how
I should understand things differently. Finally, I use methods that are
179
amenable to these particular research conditions I choose the narrative

interview method for engaging in open conversations about indigeneity
and indigenous resistance not limited to previously set questions, but
by beginning with their particular life and land histories. I also set time
aside for their questions about my ontologies, epistemologies, and life
history. A recurring question I have been asked, for example, is whether,
and what, I know of indigenous peoples in North America. This kind
of place-based ethnographic research design allows me to learn from the
research process, creating a feedback loop in conversation with research
participants to enhance research content, outcomes, and most meaning-
fully, to learn how my research can be useful to them, as reciprocity is
central to queer decolonial feminist research (for instance, by offering
research and translation support services).
I also intentionally undertake a form of ethnographic refusal as a
declaration of solidarity, and as a way of decolonizing the research pro-
cess. Sherry Ortner (1995) argues that research into resistance must be
ethnographically thick, showcasing the internal messiness of resistance
groups in order to produce the most rigorous research. Yet, indigenous
activists and scholars (e.g. Simpson, 2007) turn the model on its head,
arguing instead for refusal to share certain information with the acad-
emy, in order to protect the interests of the research participants, as an
engagement in solidarity politics. In direct contradiction to the rational-
positivist quest for truth that the western academy is historically built
upon, ethnographic refusal queers research by enabling such decolonial
scholar-activism.
In fact, I see research as resistance (Brown and Strega, 2005), a
queer process that destabilizes, rethinks, and questions normative opera-
tions of power. In doing so, it allows me to actively queer my relation-
ship to research, situating myself in a subject-position alongside other re-
search subjects as an active agent/observer, while queering indigeneity and
indigenous resistance as not only already queer, but as already resistant.
In an attempt to bridge theory and practice, I engage the queer
decolonial politics of my feminist research with the research process in
the next section by examining my relationship with the space of queerness
on the one hand, the queering of the Adivasi in relation to the state,
and indigenous politics on the other, and the possibility of decolonial
180
feminist praxis that emerges at their meeting. By looking into the political
conditions in Kerala that allow the indigenous person to be constructed
as queer, I ask, what is the space of the indigenous person in contempo-
rary politics? How can we better understand the complexity of the indig-
enous condition by positing it to be queer? And finally, I ask, what condi-
tions of possibility are created by a queer decolonial feminist theory for
envisioning a radical indigenous politics that goes beyond positioning the
indigenous person as marginal other?
IV. Queering Contemporary Adivasi Indigeneities

In queering indigeneity and indigenous resistance, within the queer deco-
lonial feminist framework, I undertake an analytical and political cou-
pling of the two, and a related coupling of indigenous epistemologies
and ontologies as they are produced and maintained through the perfor-
mance and experience of indigeneity and indigenous resistance. In what
follows, I use a rhizomatic approach to show the continuities between
the analytically differentiated indigeneity and indigenous resistance as ly-
ing materially and symbolically within land. While the following sections
are presented as distinct entities, they are best read together as fluid out-
comes of queering, revealing multiple spiraling layers of different aspects
of contemporary indigeneity.
1. Queering Indigeneity: Performing Indigenous Identity

as Decolonial Resistance
To speak of Indigeneity is to speak of colonialism and anthropology,
as these are means through which Indigenous people have been known
and sometimes are still known (Simpson, 2007: 67).
For the indigenous in India, the term indigeneity is laden with a pecu-
liar problem: their historicity as the oldest occupants of the land predat-
ing all other groups is contested for its temporal accuracy. While in settler
states the moment of encounter, i.e. colonization, demarcates clearly the
antecedence of the colonized as an indigenous population as opposed
to the settling outsiders, the Indian subcontinents long and complex civ-
ilizational history obfuscates any such binary. As Alpa Shah (2007: 1807)
writes, the Indian state maintains that there are no indigenous people
181
in the country owing to its long and complex history of migration and
settlement. Within such a politics of erasure, queering indigeneity does the
difficult task of making Adivasi presence as indigenous peoples visible,
while illustrating how indigeneity, owing to its material and political ties
to land, comes to be synonymous with indigenous resistance.
The term Adivasi is used as a socio-political signifier of indige-
neity, indicating both the long historical presence of the indigenous in
India, and the political mobilization of a previously marginalized people
against their historical oppression and exploitation. The origin of the
term is usually attributed to a series of resistances against British colonial
occupation of Adivasi territory in Chotanagpur in central India in the
1930s, where it was used to counter the imperialists claims to indigenous
lands (see Shah, 2007 for a detailed look at its origins). While the legal
term within political parlance continues to be tribe and tribal follow-
ing colonial practices of social stratification, people have since used Ad-
ivasi to self-identify as political subjects with particular claims to land.
As Baviskar (2007) writes, Adivasi is now a unique entity animated by
complex social practices that have accrued around it, with the capacity
to demand a regime of rights that recognize the history of dispossession
and exploitation suffered by Adivasi groups. In harnessing this capacity
during resistance events and in the judicial system, indigenous rights ac-
tivists often frame their demands as essential to indigenous identity, and
as fundamentally different from the rest of society. Behind this regime
of representation lies a form of strategic essentialism necessitated by
real material needs, many of which are grounded in ontologies that are
obscured by being different (or queer) and are therefore unrecognizable.
A critical analysis of the political condition of Adivasis under the
British reveals a history of scientific racism that later translated into a
more nuanced ethnic racism evident in colonial anthropology and the
state policies it informed (Bhukya, 2008; Pati, 2010). Although these con-
ditions prevail today, the parametrics of settler colonialism are consid-
ered inapplicable in the Indian context because of the physical departure
of the British government in 1947. An explanation of the continuing
conditions of coloniality lie in the internal colonialism of the Indian
state evident in existing colonial ideas, institutions and policies on the
one hand (for instance, the creation of the Forest Department through
182
the Forest Act that acts as a police force protecting forests as state terri-
tory and not Adivasi homelands) and the continuity of Adivasi resistance
in response to such coloniality on the other.
Queering complicates the understanding of such resistance by re-
vealing the continued antithetical presence of the Adivasi despite the
combined power of colonialism, modernity, capitalism and development
(all enacting various colonialities), to be a form of resistance. In the settler
colonial context, the triumph of the colonial project (establishing and
maintaining the sovereignty of the settler state) is marked by the material
and cultural erasure of the indigene (Smith, 2010; Wolfe, 2006). Here,
the continued presence of the indigenous person, and their knowledges
and ideas, are antithetical to colonialism and coloniality, and therefore an
enactment of decolonization and decoloniality. Likewise, in the context
of internal colonialism, the continued existence of Adivasis as active
indigenes, rather than passive state-subjects, embodying ontologies and
epistemologies derived from ancestral relations to land, is an enactment
of decolonization. Hereby, presence as resistance becomes decolonial
praxis, where indigenous lands as sites of resistance become spaces to
be decolonized, and indigenous epistemologies as decolonial knowledges
open spaces to dismantle and destabilize modernist logics. Such a defini-
tion expands the idea of resistance to include embodied resistances, such
that the non-engagement of some Adivasis in land struggles count as
decolonial resistance, whereby simply by living and practicing their indi-
geneity, they enact decolonization. Here, resistance gains momentum in a
decolonial politics derived from a certain ontological relationship to land
that forms the basis of Adivasi identity. Significantly, decolonization, as a
theoretical-political exercise, cannot be decoupled from resistance, as any
theory of decolonization and decoloniality is also a theory of resistance.
While others have outlined the complexity of the indigenous condi-
tion in India (see for instance, Baviskar, 2005; Bhukya, 2008; Guha, 2012;
Munshi, 2007, 2012; Khan, 2016; Shah, 2007) my goal is to illustrate its
characteristics at a microcosmic level through ethnographic analysis in
Kerala. Given Keralas unique position within India as a communist state,
though often acting in the interest of global capitalism by implementing
neoliberal polices and steering state-led development plans, its Adivasis
are also already queer in their relationship to the state as non-modern
183
others. In order to understand the often contradictory and complex

relationship of the indigene with this communist-neoliberal state, I queer
indigeneity to reveal the emergent and existing modalities of resistance
evident in the Adivasis struggles against the colonialism of capitalism,
development, and modernity in defense of their ancestral lands. Signifi-
cantly, I propose that through such a QDF lens the Adivasis resistances
emerge primarily as epistemological and ontological enactments of de-
colonization.
1 (a) Queering Indigeneity Reveals that Ontological

Differences Sustain Coloniality
In Kerala, Adivasis perform, enact, practice, negotiate, and strategically
politicize their indigenous identity as decolonial acts of resistance, es-
pecially in their land struggles (I delve into this in a later section). While
doing so, they operate within a space of queerness, firstly, as intentionally
marginalized queer state-subjects in their relegated position as non-cit-
izens living in federally controlled and managed forest areas subject to
the rules of the state-society. Simultaneously, state policy is purportedly
aimed at transforming Adivasis into full citizens by recognizing and sub-
sequently correcting their marginal status through development plans.
However, that this marginality is indeed constructed and maintained by
the state becomes particularly evident in moments of deep ontological
contradiction. For example:
The Kerala government has several progressive laws and policies that
recognize Adivasis inalienable rights to their ancestral lands, rights that
are enshrined in the fifth and sixth schedules of the Indian constitu-
tion, enabling them to live on their lands, in their ways. While imple-
menting these laws, the state also administers development policies
aimed at creating a common living standard across the state. A housing
development project was proposed for a group of deep forest-dwelling
Adivasis, to construct concrete houses either in their own (protected)
lands, or if they choose to move out of the forest, in surrounding non-
Adivasi areas identified by the state, as a way to bridge the aforemen-
tioned policy goals. However, in practice, while many in and outside
the community critique this project for the high transportation costs,
184
and hard human labor involved in moving building materials to such

remote areas with little or no road access, some point to the lack of
ecological meaning of these houses when compared to their vernacular
bamboo and mud architecture. Several community members say they
would rather have better roads and transportation so that they can de-
cide for themselves what kind of houses they would like to live in,
have better access to healthcare (given traditional systems have been
structurally depleted by various modern interventions), and an easier
commute to sites of work and learning. (Field notes, 2016)
As this example reveals, Adivasi politics are not merely subject to
the internal colonialism of the state at the policy level, but also to the
operation of coloniality at an everyday level. The state exerts both direct
(and material) and indirect (and ideological, structural) power over the
Adivasis (at both individual and collective bodily and structural levels),
respectively through the physical enforcement of laws governing bound-
aries and norms by police officers and forest officials, and through of-
ficial policies, mandates, laws and practices of the state in its many forms
(through federal laws governing land acquisition, forest conservation and
management; policies of land use mediated by the forest department
and the revenue department; and practices enforced by state-run and
state-supported institutions, including NGOs). And such power is felt
by Adivasis who operate both within and outside state spaces. Queering
this example reveals that state policies create and maintain conditions of
marginality and coloniality by failing to recognize the deep ontological
divide between the forest department, which maintains that roads are
ecologically unsuitable and unadvisable, the tribal department that sees
the Adivasis as impudent children unwilling to leave archaic spaces, and
Adivasis, who see themselves and their needs as an integral part of the
ecological sustainability of the region.
1 (b) Queering Indigeneity Reveals that Adivasi Self-

Recognition Queers Power Relations
Queering indigeneity reveals its complex of meanings ranging between
individual self-identification as socio-cultural-ecological expression, and
strategic political identification as an agentive political category, particu-
185
larly in the context of land rights. These meanings are often in direct
response to the coloniality of externally imposed identities that range
between the ecologically superior noble savage and the ignorant, non-
modern, uncivilized primitive (visible for instance in human-interest me-
dia reports on poverty/development/conservation).
Historically, this self-recognition becomes politically necessary be-
cause of the linear vision of the state and other dominant systems of
power that cast Adivasis as culturally distinct tribals with different so-
cio-political systems that are, both, inside and outside, state-society, and
who through processes of mainstreaming must be transformed into full
citizens of the state. Within queer visions of the Adivasis themselves,
they are cast as indigenous peoples, identifying with others across the
world with legitimate (even if not legal within the domains of the
state) claims to ancestral territories and socio-ecological political systems.
This self-identification and political positioning is in itself a resistance to
the colonial category of tribe that continues to narrowly define their
complex, nuanced and diverse existence. I explain this further by reflect-
ing on recurring narrative used by several Adivasis that is best under-
stood when situated within a space of queerness.
When the Adivasis speak of themselves as Adivasis, as the indigenous

peoples, and others as those of the country, country-man/boy,
country-woman/girl, country-person/child and as generalites,
their linguistic choice is based on a politics of difference, that when
queered, reveals the country to be the periphery (even if bigger and
more powerful) surrounding their indigenous center (Field notes,
2016).
At first glance it seems politically useful, especially in a supposed
welfare state (like Kerala) to adopt and support a politics of mar-
ginality that discursively and materially positions Adivasis as those on
the outside, needing and deserving government support and welfare.
However, the resulting politics of control (through state mandates and
policies), and the more insidious politics of pitting agency against iden-
tity, wherein agency is only available to those willing to relinquish, or at
least successfully disguise, their indigenous identity, leaves Adivasi indi-
geneity in a political vacuum devoid of justice. Queering refuses to accept
186
the normativity of such a subject position that builds figurative walls

around what is intentionally placed at the center, and the plebeian world,
which in this case are Adivasi worlds. By challenging such an operation
of power at its core by revealing its colonial bases, queering also makes
it possible to reimagine a politics of decolonial resistance that takes the
inversion of the margin and the center as its starting point.
Thus, while queering Adivasi indigeneity in Kerala reveals its colo-
nial relation with the state, it also reveals the relational construction of
marginality undertaken by both groups. Owing to the fact that power is
indeed vested in the state, this relationship is often perceived to be fixed
and unchanging, when in fact it is performed differently in different con-
texts. While the states performance is accepted as part of its pluralist
governance strategy, performed Adivasi indigeneity is automatically cast
as inauthentic and essentialist, or authentic and essentialist (depending
on whether one uses a positive or negative conception of difference).
However, the tendency to see performed Adivasi indigeneity as inau-
thentic is not a problem that is particular to India alone. It is therefore a
significant political move in the Indian context to understand Adivasi in-
digeneity as fluid and politically strategic, because such an understanding
not only posits the indigene to be an active political agent, but also cre-
ates possibilities for mobilizing and negotiating land relations and rights.
Queering contests the states (and often, the state-societys) presupposition
of historical linearity that demands a fixed unilateral representation of
Adivasis as primitive, dependent, and non-modern (the authentic,
recognizable identity), in order to accept/allow their engagement in land
politics and resistances for land. Queering reveals instead that the space of
indigeneity (which is also the space of queerness) includes material land, as
indigeneity is always-already in relation to land.
1 (c) Queering Indigeneity Reveals that Land is the

Material Space of Queerness
The politics of land is indeed constructed with the indigenes on the
periphery, in their own semantics and everyday practices and lives. While
they operate at the margins, and sometimes within the center (e.g. as
government and NGO employees), much of their ontological and epis-
temological imaginaries (and consequently narratives) are built with them
187
very squarely in the center. Queering, as that which troubles the norma-
tive, is thus immensely useful in understanding these subterranean opera-
tions of power, especially the shifting, growing, morphing and moving
of power across different positions.
I queer Adivasi resistance in India to further demonstrate the com-
plexities of indigeneity and indigenous politics in Kerala, and also to
show its inextricable ties with land and land politics. To reiterate, it is not
my intention to separate indigeneity and indigenous resistance as distinct
and unrelated categories, but rather to analytically queer the two separately
in order to further highlight the theoretical and practical continuities be-
tween them.
In Attappady, several Adivasi land rights activists and community
members (not all) identify an ontological relationship to land that is rep-
resented in particular historical narratives pertaining to their territories.
If the land isnt there, we are not there. Without us, there is no land.
Without land we cannot live, we cannot cultivate crops. Nowadays all
the talk about land rights is because of this all the problems we face
are because of [problems with, or not having] land. We Adivasis have
an umbilical connection with the land, that is who we are. That is our
connection. It is because of not having land that we have all these
problems, our connection is broken. (Group interview on February 7,
2016; translated from Tamil and Malayalam by the author)
The struggle for land rights that has been underway in the region is
underwritten by such an ontological relationship to land, as indigenous
scholars in the Americas have also asserted, land occupies as an on-
tological framework for understanding relationships (Coulthard, 2010:
79). In fact, Adivasis ontological claims extend to referring themselves
as the land, and to the land as the living world (Field notes, 2014, 2016).
In their resistances to numerous state-led and private sector de-
velopment initiatives, as well as national and international conservation
programs, the Adivasis of Attappady use various legal mechanisms to
claim their ancestral rights to their previously common lands. In doing
so, they often perform their indigeneity through an identity politics that
attempts to speak the states language in order to gain both recognition
188
and acceptance (see Coulthard, 2014). In moments when their actions

are not channeled through these legal vestiges of power, they are ei-
ther dismissed as petulant or misinformed (in narratives that cast them
as childlike, without political awareness or agency), or in stark contrast,
more nefariously, as Naxalites or Maoists, and therefore both bodily
targeted and categorically dismissed as internal terrorists without justifi-
able rights to resistance. Queering resistance at such complex junctures
reveals several underlying ontological problems, including the valuation
of land, and the meaning of land as forest.
While there are clear differences in the ways land is valued by the
state and market on the one hand, and Adivasis on the other, it is onto-
logical linkages that are befogged by linear valuations seeing land as place
devoid of relations. When asked what image comes to their mind when
thinking of the word land, most Adivasis I interviewed said they saw
(living worlds containing) mountains, rivers, their homes/homestead,
cultivable areas, animals, trees, birds, their ancestors and built structures
(Field notes, 20142016). One striking response was everything and
everybody in the family (Interview notes, 2016). I draw on a series of
conversations in March 2016 to illustrate how the Adivasis frame the on-
tological significance of their land as lying within a particular mountain:
The mountain peak that can be seen from the Attappady valley, from all
of its hills except one, is God say the Adivasis. While one of the Adi-
vasi groups continue their tradition of undertaking a ritualistic pilgrim-
age every year to the peak to celebrate and worship the God, others
worship at the fairly new temple that has been built in the Gods honor.
Those who undertake the annual pilgrimage say what is atop the peak
is a stone, a part of the mountain that is an embodied God, and that
the space itself is a shape shifting space that grows to accommodate all
those who make the climb. Because of the influence of Hindu settlers
the temple is known to all those who visit as a local Siva temple, as the
mountain God is now seen as a form of Lord Siva. While both locals
and visitors from nearby towns visit the temple, many fail to pay atten-
tion to its particular location. When standing outside the temple, what
is visible from its gateway is the peak, the abode of the mountain god,
the most sacred of spaces. The temple stands in unspoken, symbolic
189
tribute to the real place of the Adivasi God, even as it houses their
hybrid Hindu structural form.
Queering Adivasi land relations in this instance goes to show that it
is not land as abstracted space that has meaning and value, but particular
lands that have ontological, not only spiritual and material, value. It also
shows that Adivasi resistances for land are not simply about cultivable
spaces (even though they are that), but also about the materiality derived
from particular ontological relations to specific lands. In queering indig-
enous resistance, this not only reveals historical continuities between
expressions of indigeneity (as resistance), but also the continuing on-
tological violence rendered by multiple colonialities that by imposing an
ontological and epistemological hierarchy fail to see real and material ties
to lands and living worlds, resulting in what Blaser (2009, 2010, 2014)
calls ontological politics.
2. Queering Gender and Sexuality

In this section, I employ queering as an active tool to destabilize nodes,
structures, spaces and processes in which power becomes ossified with
regard to gender and sexuality in an attempt to unearth some alterna-
tive, decolonial understandings of the varied and often nefarious ways in
which normative understandings serve to undercut the complexities of
contemporary Adivasi indigeneity.
The notion that gender difference is often externally imposed
through varied experiences of power, ranging from the colonizers advo-
cated cultural superiority to the invading populaces construction of its
socio-cultural-ecological practices as the norm (for example by attribut-
ing gender to gods, co-opting pagan worship practices), and the states
legal system, has been debated and explored by various scholars. For
instance, the construction of heteropatriarchy is seen as a key feature of
(settler) colonialism (Smith, 2010; Arvin et al., 2013) where the conjoin-
ing of colonialism with patriarchy enforces the violent removal of the
indigenous person from the land and imposes several binaries, including
those of male/female, body/mind, lived knowledge/learned knowledge,
and so on (Simpson, 2012). Such hierarchical and binary constructions
are also evident in Attappady, a key example of which is the transforma-
190
tion of the mountain God into a male Hindu God, as described above.
While the coloniality evident in these lingering institutions and practices
is indeed significant, noting their decisive impacts on Adivasis gender
norms is only the first layer of the onion that queering aims to peel.
2 (a) Queering Adivasi History Reveals Gender-Land-

Ecology Relations
British colonialism, the usual referent of Indias colonial history, did
much by way of importing British patriarchy to the Indian colony.
However, the Adivasis relative historical isolation allowed them a de-
gree of protection from experiencing the full weight of colonialism in
the early years. While the British visited Adivasi lands in Attappady in
the early twentieth century to conduct land surveys and were guided in
their mapping efforts by some Adivasi groups living in the valley areas,
other groups of Adivasis living in higher, more rugged mountain areas
insist that their lands were not surveyed till the late 1930s (Field notes,
20112016). By most historical accounts, British colonialism is consid-
ered the colonial experience that shaped Indias political, cultural, social
and ecological history. In the case of Adivasis, this is especially true as
it was British colonialism that was materially and politically felt through
organized and systematic visits and territorial sanctions that left their
imprint on Adivasi lands and bodies.
In Attappady, the invasion of Adivasi territory in the early twenti-
eth century by rural settlers (an early form of internal colonialism) and
the subsequent occupation of Adivasi commons through negotiation,
trickery, and force, led to major socio-ecological and cultural transfor-
mations. In what follows, I examine the intersectional effects of such
transformations illustrating how the colonization of Adivasi lands and
their subsequent colonial experiences work at a deeper level to disrupt
and radically change gender, land, and ecological relations, often with
deleterious effects.
Previously we didnt have any distinctions between who was male, and
who was female. We dont see difference like that. Now, we do. Wheth-
er adults or children, we never used to care [about gender]. In fact, we
191
didnt wear any clothes till we were about fifteen2. We all work equally,
it is not like you country folk [with your gender differences]. During
Kambalakkadu the women and men dance together and celebrate for
many days. We used to do this every year and it was a big deal it was
a massive celebration but now we dont do it anymore. The circum-
stances have changed. The forest has taken over the lands that we used
to cultivate, and we need particular spaces to do these ceremonies that
we dont have access to. That is a major struggle for us now, not hav-
ing access to our usual lands because we have different uses for our
lands that the forest department doesnt recognize. (February 10, 2016;
Translated from Tamil and Malayalam by the author)
This extended excerpt illustrates a number of things, showing both
the scope of queering and the depth of complexities hidden beneath dec-
larations of change that are often regarded as normal and simplistic
indicators of the changing times. What is obvious at first glance, is that
Adivasis gender relations are significantly transformed by restrictions in
access to the lands that were previously available for different uses. Kam-
balakkadu is a harvest ceremony that brings together men and women in
a cultural-ecological celebration intended to foster a spirit of thanks and
celebration in particular cultivable areas. Now with all forestlands being
under federal control, and with the forest department, through a colonial
history of scientific forestry and forest management policies (Sivaramak-
rishnan, 1995) designating areas for habitation and cultivation by its own
logics, Kambalakkadu is no longer performed. In fact, the particularity
of cultivable areas and the historical use of shifting cultivation were and
continue to be entirely disregarded in forest service allocation processes.
What also emerges while queering is the impact of changing gen-
der norms on Adivasi work culture as realms of shared work have now
shifted across gender lines, particularly because of the restrictions in ac-
cess to cultivable lands. While in some cases it has transformed both
women and men into unwilling welfare subjects who no longer engage
in agricultural work outside the home, in others, changes in the nature of
2
This particular interviewee was the oldest in the group (he estimated his age
to be around sixty).
192
agricultural practices shifting from subsistence food crop cultivation to

state-supported cash-crop cultivation (as the latter is no longer economi-
cally viable) has been accompanied by a skewing of the division of labor.
In fact, queering further reveals that subsistence farming included com-
modity exchanges in the early postcolonial years with Adivasis selling
part of their harvest and gathered food (honey and tubers, for example)
in order to purchase small items such as rock salt, small onions and black
pepper (Field notes, June 2014, February 2016).
Furthermore, queering understandings of gender within this context
reveals how experiences of indigeneity are differentiated along lines of
gender, age, class, and so on. It also reveals the transverse material links
between indigeneity and indigenous resistance deriving from land that
serves as a source of commonality, rather than difference. Just as queering
the death of infants in Attappady reveals causal ties between malnu-
trition of infants and pregnant mothers, and land loss, alienation from
land, and the subsequent changes in socio-political-ecological practices,
queering indigeneity along different lines reveals its multiple ties with land.
Queering reveals the milieu of land uses and land relations that sus-
tain Adivasi communities, mediating, negotiating, and organizing their
use of particular lands for particular purposes. For instance, kaaTu
refers to land for agriculture, while maNu refers to all land, territory
and living world, veeTu refers to home, and solai refers to the forest
(Interview notes, 2016). Subsuming all of these under the category of
land and then identifying land use practices and modalities of access
produces much material and discursive violence in its wake. The land
rights derived from such a narrow and potentially harmful vision are
then mediated and negotiated by the Forest Department in the region, as
the agent of the state responsible for meting out use and access rights.
Queering land rights in this context reveals that not all rights recognized by
the community in its practices can be acknowledged by the state so long
as it maintains its singular vision.
Further, queering also reveals how these multiple land uses and prac-
tices intersect with gender and health in nefarious ways. For instance,
in an effort to address the growing problem of neo/prenatal and child
malnutrition, the state, in collaboration with community members, local
and International NGOs, conducted extensive research into the prob-
193
lems origins. It concluded that the origins lay in drastic changes in life-
style and food consumption patterns, and hence introduced a number
of progressive measures to ensure an increase in nutrition, healthcare
access, and overall wellbeing. One such intervention was the creation
of locally operated, female-run community kitchens aimed at feed-
ing two undernourished populations the very young and the very old.
Ironically, the kitchens provided rice and lentils, both of which are not
a part of the traditional diet, whose loss led to malnutrition in the first
place. When queered, the links between colonial erasure of food systems,
and the need to revive and rejuvenate pre-colonial land use practices, be-
comes evident. Similarly, another intervention involved providing Ragi,
protein-rich millet that was once a staple in their diet. This project has
been relatively more successful owing to its context-specificity, dictated
in large part by the fact that it was designed in consultation with the lo-
cal Nodal Health Officer with extensive local contextual knowledge. Yet,
instead of making local cultivation of Ragi possible and prosperous (or
putting long term policies in place alongside short term planning), the
government rations packaged Ragi produced elsewhere in the state to
the communities. Hence, once again, the ontological and material ties
between land, as a source of ecological continuity and livelihood, and life
itself, were not visible to the unqueered eye of the state.
2 (b) Queering Sexuality at a Glance

Queering Adivasi sexuality reveals another set of incongruences and epis-
temological ruptures in the linear vision of the state.
During the course of a conversation with a group of Adivasi activists

in 2014, I was told that a group of Adivasis in the region had been fol-
lowing a marriage practice where two young post-pubescent individuals
choose one another, and build a hut together that they then occupy as
husband and wife. However, the imposition of a state law criminalized
any sexual encounter under the age of 18 as rape and sexual abuse of
a minor, leading to accusations of sexual deviance in the less serious
cases, and to accusations of rape in more serious ones. This served
to disproportionately affect young men, casting them as rapists, while
casting some young women as sexual deviants, and others, in the rare
194
case, as rape victims. Yet, in strong contrast, a young Adivasi woman

who was raped by a rural settler was not recognized as a rape victim
because of the presumed sexual deviance of Adivasi culture where all
sexual encounter is assumed to be consensual because of the purport-
ed difference in Adivasi sexual practices. (Field notes, June 2014)
Hereby, operating within a space of queerness, Adivasis become sexual
subjects without any judicial recourse simply because of their differ-
ence (or, queerness). Thus queering narratives about gender and sexuality,
or any other category under study, reveals not only what underlies the
thing itself, but also reveals cross connections and linkages unbounded
by the category, making it analytically open and malleable. Queering in
this context also critically points to the links to land, identifying land as
the source of all decolonial Adivasi politics. Hence, queering is not just
about decolonizing relations to land, but also about the decolonization
of everything in relation, as these open categories are inextricably linked.
V. Some Queer Thoughts that Persist

It is not easy to piece together the many ill-fitting pieces of the jigsaw
that makes up the tale of the Adivasis in India, and particularly, in Kerala.
Queering the Adivasi story offers one way to connect seemingly disparate
nodal points in the story by bringing colonialism to the forefront, identi-
fying how they are situated within the condition of coloniality, and high-
lighting their resulting decolonial resistance. Thus far, I have drawn a few
lines of analysis to show how queering challenges the supposed marginal-
ity of the Adivasi, making their agentive power visible. By foregrounding
a decolonial perspective, queering shows how the internal colonialism of
the Indian state categorically marginalizes the Adivasi both materially and
discursively, as a condition of its operation. It is through the modality
of operation of power under coloniality that Adivasi marginality is thus
produced. Queering indigeneity reveals how such constructed marginality
can be challenged, negotiated and transformed through resistance, mak-
ing the need for decolonization imminently visible.
Queering therefore offers a moment of possibility to challenge and
change conventional discourses around indigeneity in Attappady, in par-
ticular, and in India in general. For instance, it shows how marginality
195
is systematically constructed by various structures of oppressive power

and finds no place in the Adivasis own self-imaginaries. Yet Adivasis also
sometimes engage in a strategic, political performance of marginality to
claim their indigeneity in the eyes of the state (for various policy benefits,
and in their resistances). Seen within a performative frame, an active dy-
namic thus emerges between acts of centering and decentering Adivasi
identity. Queering Adivasi indigeneity in this context challenges the bi-
nary between modern ontology, and Adivasi land ontologies, enrich-
ing possibilities for Adivasi futurities to be a part of a modern Indian
imaginary from which it is otherwise excluded based on essentialized
understandings of difference. By casting Adivasis as intentionally queer in
relation to the state and non-indigenous state-society, it is possible to see
the space of indigeneity as a space of queerness with power vested within
its confines.
Queering allows the analytical, and therefore discursive coupling of
indigeneity and indigenous resistance within the space of queerness that
includes the material land conceptualized as living worlds of intercon-
nected beings. By revealing the deep ontological linkages between land,
indigeneity, and resistance, and showing how a politics of land is not
confined to material struggles for land alone, it offers a range of liberato-
ry possibilities. Operating within a queer decolonial feminist framework,
it produces a number of such conditions of possibility for envisioning a
radical indigenous politics that goes beyond positioning the indigenous
person as marginal other. For one, it stands to impact the ways in which
Adivasi relations to land are understood in state policymaking and prac-
tice. At its simplest, it advocates for a peeling exercise, employing queering
to unearth the complexities that lie beneath the surface.
Queering also expands present conceptions of indigenous resistance
showing how ontological differences in conceptions of land mediate and
characterize resistance. By bringing a queer decolonial feminist lens to
the study of resistance, it also expands the understanding of resistance
in general, outside of the classical social movement frame (see McAdam
et al., 1996). While there are indeed Adivasi social movements engaged
in resistance in Kerala, like the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha (see Steur,
2011), queering resistance in Attappady reveals diverse resistance politics
that cannot be contained within the umbrella of a social movement. For
196
instance, by situating the meaning and nature of resistance within a deco-

lonial frame, queering reveals the active, continuing presence of the Adi-
vasi within the modern nation state to be an act of decolonial resistance.
Additionally, queering complicates resistance by seeing acts of refusal,
non-engagement, and denial and at their core, ontological difference as
decolonial engagements and acts of resistance. Even when Adivasis do
not engage in protests and movement actions, they continue to live in liv-
ing worlds of their own ontological, epistemological, and material mak-
ing. This continued presence and prevalence of Adivasi land ontologies,
and the living worlds that their ontologies enact and sustain despite years
of colonial intervention, indicates presence to be a modality of resis-
tance in general, and a form of embodied resistance in particular.
Such interpretations of resistance do not fit into notions of ev-
eryday resistance (Scott, 2008) either. While everyday resistances cap-
ture the elusive, intangible characteristics of covert resistance, they do
not account for active presence as resistance. Presence as resistance in-
dicates the ontological foundations of resistance, showing active pres-
ence within ontologically distinct (even if not entirely dissimilar) living
worlds (as spaces of resistance) to be a form of decolonial resistance. As
such, embodied resistances evident in Attappady are not only dynamic
responses and reactions, but also a priori forms of ontologically distinct
existence effecting active disengagement. Such resistance, while insuffi-
ciently explained by studies of individual/collective, covert/overt forms
of resistance, can be better understood as a conjoined component of
decoloniality where that which is decolonial, is already in resistance. That
is, by illustrating the complex and multiple ties between various internal
colonial forces acting on the Adivasis and their impacts on Adivasi land
ontologies and living worlds, queering reveals indigenous resistance to be
fundamentally decolonial in nature. Hereby, to engage in decolonization
is to engage in resistance and vice-versa.
Further, queerings usefulness as an analytical tool can be harnessed
in several other ways that have not been within the scope of this paper.
Some central questions that remain have to do with a second layer of
analysis that queering makes possible for instance, by revealing the deep
ontological linkages between land, food, and health, it can enrich the
field of environmental justice by creating pathways to decolonize cur-
197
rent debates in the field. In doing so, it can point to food sovereignty as
an end goal of decolonial environmental justice in the Adivasi context.
In another sense, queering as a tool of decolonization can impact
the recognition and production of decolonial knowledges and theo-
ries by actively queering Adivasi land ontologies as theory. Relatedly, by
pointing to the ontological basis of resistance, queering also significantly
casts the alternative understandings produced, mobilized, and effected
by such resistances as theory. Taiaiake Alfred (1999, 2005) has argued
that indigenous resistance must imagine alternative futures through po-
litical strategies divorced from the state sovereignty model. He argues
for what Simpson (2012) calls looking back to look forward, drawing
from indigenous knowledges, ontologies, and practices the autonomy
of individual conscience, non-coercive authority, and the deep intercon-
nection between human beings and other elements of the creation. The
production of such decolonial frameworks through resistance can also
be seen as an iterative practice of queering whereby future moments of
possibility are created and imagined from points of similarity and con-
nection, rather than difference. Through its various enactments of lib-
eratory practices and politics, queering ultimately stands to markedly serve
justice to peoples for whom it has too long been delayed, and denied. As
such, it stands to contribute much to decolonization in this part of the
global Souths fourth world. As Leroy Little Bear (2005: xii) writes,
Decolonization as a tangible unknown leaves room for dialogue and

for dissent, as well as for coming together to each contribute to one
anothers shared visions and goals. We dont write this as a conclusion
because the end of the story has not been written and, in truth, the
story isnt even linear in that way. Indigenous stories circle back, are
performed and re-performed, and, with each telling and re-telling a
new layer is added, a new truth revealed.
Queering, too, in its continued decolonizing actions and enactments
can plough on in hopes of peeling, telling, re-telling, and adding new
layers to contemporary Adivasi indigeneity, its politics, and possibilities.
198
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204
Book Reviews
Classic book review

Something About Love
bell hooks (2001) All about Love: New Visions. New York: Perennial.
ISBN: 9780060959470
Several years ago, when I first read bell hooks book All About Love,
then already a classic, it spoke to me in words which I had yearned to
hear for years, or decades, really. It talked about how we are all wounded
and vulnerable. It talked about how woundedness should not be a cause
for shame, as it is necessary for our spiritual growth and awakening. It
beautifully described how accepting our vulnerability and embracing our
wounds instead of being ashamed of them can help us in processes of
healing. When I feel hurt, sad or disempowered, I often return to this
book again.
All About Love is, however, much more than a book about personal
traumas and individual processes of healing. It is a book that conceptu-
alizes love from a social, political, and collective perspective. Obviously,
hooks is not the only scholar who theorizes love in this way consider,
for example, philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari as well as Hardt
and Negri but she addresses the theme in the framework of patriar-
chy, developing the concept of love especially in the context of feminist
scholarship.
The book consists of 13 chapters, preceded by an intimate preface
as well as an introduction chapter. Hence, it will not be possible to go
into great detail in this short review. In what follows, I will try to focus on
those perspectives of the book which may be of interest to the readers
of the Journal of Resistance Studies.
In the introduction, hooks critically discusses the existing literature
on love while differentiating her own approach from others. She is very
critical of the normal usage of the concept of love as it often deval-
ues and degrades its meaning (p. 14). In chapter 1, hooks defines love
as the will to nurture our own and anothers spiritual growth (p. 6).
One of her main arguments is that love is as love does (p. 14), that
205
is, love should not be considered a feeling but a practice. According to

hooks, love cannot co-exist with abuse or neglect instead, it material-
izes through acts of care, nurturance, trust, respect, knowing, commit-
ment, and responsibility. This argument is strengthened in chapter 2 as
hooks demonstrates that love cannot exist without justice, reflecting es-
pecially on the relationship between parents and children in this context.
As childhood is the place where we first learn about love, hooks regards
unkind and/or cruel punishment meted out by the grown-ups they have
been taught they should love and respect (p. 1718) as extremely harm-
ful and confusing for children. In chapter 3 this is followed by discus-
sion on patriarchal masculinity, lying, lovelessness, estrangement from
feelings, the inability to connect with others, and the inability to assume
responsibility for causing pain, all of which can be resisted, according
to hooks, only through commitment to honesty and being true to love.
Throughout the book, hooks moves smoothly and sometimes
surprisingly fast from an analysis of broader power structures (which
are considered only partly external) to the personal, turning the gaze
inwards. In chapter 4, she explicitly highlights the importance of self-
acceptance and self-love as the foundation of the practice of love: Giv-
ing ourselves love we provide our inner being with the opportunity to
have the unconditional love we may have always longed to receive from
someone else (p. 67). If one is incapable of accepting and loving one-
self, efforts to love others are destined to fail. What is beautiful in this
conception of love is the strong emphasis placed on how we must not
only avoid hurting others but also ourselves that the practice of self-
care and a kind, respectful, loving attitude towards oneself creates a basis
for treating others in the same way. At the same time, it is important to
uphold the willingness to stand up for oneself, that is, to practice self-
assertiveness which is still too often regarded as a threat to femininity
due to the requirement for girls and women to behave in a certain way, to
be good girls or dutiful daughters (p. 59), which is very different from
what is expected from boys and men.
Some of hooks most interesting arguments are presented in chap-
ter 5. She analyzes the literatures of the 1960s and 1970s, showing how
love used to be celebrated as an active spiritual force with the potential
of uniting all life. Much of the discussion on love back then vigorously
206
Book Reviews
critiqued all forms of domination, oppression, violence, and dehuman-

ization, as well as the marriage between capitalism and exploitation. As
hooks points out, the focus later shifted from this important politiciza-
tion of love to something very different: Much as I enjoy popular New
Age commentary on love, I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism
fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual
self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context
of community (p. 76). In the context of her own understanding of spir-
ituality, hooks emphasizes that spiritual practices do not necessarily need
to be connected to any organized religions to be meaningful, but it is
possible for people to find their own sacred ways, for example, by com-
municating with the natural world and engaging in practices that honor
life-sustaining ecosystems (p. 81). Recognizing that for many people it is
unusual to turn to spiritual thinking unless they are experiencing seri-
ous difficulties in their lives, hooks talks a lot about the meaning of pain
and sorrow, building on the conviction that the place of suffering can
also be a place of peace and possibility if given a possibility to become
accepted as such (p. 80). Although she does not give concrete advice on
how to accomplish this, she refers to meditation and various spiritual
practices many times in this context.
Perhaps the most timely part of the book is chapter 6 with regard
to contemporary political debate on refugees, migration, and the rise of
right-wing parties across Europe and the US. Regarding fear as the pri-
mary force maintaining the structures of domination such as racism
and patriarchy hooks reminds us that if we are continuously being
taught that safety lies always within the sameness, then difference, of
any kind, will appear as a threat (p. 93). According to her, the mecha-
nism is the same whether we talk about racism or patriarchy they both
rely on socializing everyone to believe that in all human relations there
is an inferior and a superior party (p. 97), which then works to justify
and legitimize various forms of domination, oppression, and exploita-
tion. For hooks, the only way to struggle against fear is to connect with
others, to find ourselves in the other (p. 93) by embracing an ethic of
love based on care, respect, trust, commitment, and responsibility in our
everyday lives.
In chapter 7 the ethic of love becomes intertwined with the ethic
207
of communalism through interdependency, the sharing of resources and

the principle of living simply instead of material greed and overcon-
sumption that subsume love and compassion and are fuelled by spiritual
and emotional lack in our lives (p. 105). According to hooks, the pas-
sion to possess has replaced the passion to connect (p. 105106),
resulting in serious consequences. She links greedy consumption with
dehumanization, arguing that it results inevitably in people being treated
as objects while choosing to live simply, on the contrary, contributes to
our capacity to love and practice compassion. The relationship between
patriarchy and capitalism is explored in more detail in chapter 8. Interest-
ingly from the perspective of resistance studies, hooks is convinced that
challenging these interconnected structures of domination is possible
without necessarily joining any organized movements for social change
by simply starting the process of making community where we are (p.
143). Clearly, this view is in tension with many traditional frameworks
for social change built on instrumental, state-centric and/or masculin-
ist conceptualizations of political subjectivity and social transformation,
and comes closer to anarchist and autonomous traditions, as well as ap-
proaches in which the political is understood essentially as prefigurative
and immanent.
In talking about forgiveness and servitude to others as acts of gen-
erosity, both of which are essential for spiritual growth and communal
love, hooks takes up an issue which has a very special meaning in the
context of nonviolent resistance the willingness to sacrifice. Whereas
it often represents more of a strategic approach in the context of non-
violence, manifesting also courage as well as commitment, for hooks the
willingness to sacrifice for the sake of others is rather reflective of our
awareness of interdependency (p. 143). She continues this discussion
in chapter 9 through a reflection of the principle of mutual practice of
giving and receiving, combined with the principle of sharing resources,
whether time, money, attention, or care, which she considers very con-
crete ways to express love. Through giving, receiving, and sharing, love
gains its meaning: again, through action, love materializes as a practice.
This idea continues through chapter 10, which deals with romance, and
chapter 11 in which the most intriguing part of the discussion revolves
around death. The worship of death is, according to hooks, especially
208
Book Reviews
powerful in Western traditions, and intimately related to the fear of the

stranger: We believe the stranger is a messenger of death who wants our
life Even though we are more likely to be hurt by someone we know
than a stranger, our fear is directed toward the unknown and the unfa-
miliar (p. 193). In hooks view, the worship of death can be resisted by
challenging patriarchy, working for peace and justice through the practice
of love, and by giving away the fear of dying. As knowing how to love
is also a way of knowing how to die, it empowers us to live fully and
die well (p. 197). In this way, death becomes an integral part of living,
instead of being an abject to be separated from life.
In chapters 12 and 13, hooks returns to the theme of wounding
and healing, but focuses more attention on religion, reminding the reader
that patriarchal perspectives have always strongly influenced religions.
Although clearly articulating her interest in Christian traditions, hooks
spiritual practices and beliefs also resonate with Buddhist approaches.
According to her, it is not accidental that so many of the spiritual teach-
ers we gravitate to in our affluent society, which is driven by the ethos
of rugged individualism, come from cultures that value interdependen-
cy and working for a collective good over independence and individual
gain (p. 214). From the Buddhist tradition she introduces, among other
things, the idea of surrendering, which as a practice enables the cre-
ation of spaces of compassion where one can feel sympathy for oneself
and others, thereby defying judgment as well as shame, both of which
characterize patriarchy.
What makes these views interesting from the point of view of re-
sistance studies is that in talking about the practice of love as some-
thing revolutionary, hooks suggest that one must surrender the will to
power, stressing that it is impossible to know love if we remain unable
to surrender our attachment to power (p. 221). Moreover, she argues
that all significant social movements that have struggled for freedom
and justice have promoted love as their ethical foundation. While gaining
recognition for challenging the traditional masculinist conceptions and
definition of politics as the distinction between friend and enemy, hooks
concept of love has attracted some critical questions in regard to the
relationship between the particular/local and the universal/global, with
some scholars pointing out that love may be very well replacing God
209
in the secularized West. Despite the communal nature of hooks concep-

tualization of love, the book has also been criticized for individualism,
probably due to her very personal narratives combined with a sort of a
therapeutic touch that we have become accustomed to interpret in a
very particular way in the context of medicalized Western discourses. It
is not entirely unjustified to criticize the book, one the one hand, for its
essentializing critique of men and masculinity, and on the other hand, for
its heteronormativity, the relationship between men and women being
such a central theme in the book.
There are, however, many different ways to interpret hooks ar-
guments, some of which can potentially escape the above mentioned
tensions. This can be done by approaching love from non-totalizing per-
spectives, in which love is not granted the position of God or Truth, and
by taking conscious steps away from universalizing frameworks by em-
bracing diversity both in the practice of love and with regard to its ontol-
ogy and epistemology. From the perspective of resistance and resistance
studies, the practice of love has potentially a lot to offer, for what hooks
writes about care, community, and commitment can be seen taking place
in many places across the globe where women come together to struggle
against domination, oppression, dispossession, neoliberalism, patriarchy,
racism, and sexism. One of the biggest challenges lies in how to promote
this idea to a broader audience beyond feminist scholarship. Love and
feminist solidarity are conceptually easy to connect with each other, but
it is more demanding in the case of love and resistance. How can love
be(come) a form of resistance? How can we resist with love? Can love
be(come) the constitutive foundation of resistance? It is my conviction,
based on critical perspectives arising from various cross-disciplinary in-
tersections of resistance studies, and considering what is currently taking
place in the world and world politics, that the time has come to seriously,
and creatively, to address these questions.
Tiina Seppl, University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland
210
Book Reviews
Book review
Precarity as Radical Possibility
Isabell Lorey (2015) States of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious.
London: Verso, ISBN: 9781781685969
In States of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious (2015), Isabell Lorey ad-

vocates the embrace of precarity as a radical political proposition. In
this deceptively short book, Lorey accomplishes a sweeping scope of
argument to foreground potential means of resistance that speak to the
deeply-rooted insecurity of our times. Lorey opens up political space for
agency and disobedience to emerge from within the lived experience of
precarious subjects. She asks, what would it mean to take critical distance
from those ubiquitous forms of fearfulness that make us susceptible to
escalating exploitation? And follows this by delving into examples of
political movements whose critical praxis tackles this question. In par-
ticular, Lorey foregrounds the open-ended feminized resistances of the
collective Precarias a la Deriva, whose reflexive, experiential praxis con-
nects precarity with care, and invents new ways to politicize both.
In the first three chapters of the book, Lorey elaborates a novel,
multi-layered formulation of the contemporary condition of precarity.
Her analysis goes well beyond the now-familiar insecure conditions of
employment. Lorey invites us to understand precarization (or the pro-
cesses that enact precarity) as not a passing episode, but a new mode of
regulation that distinguishes our current era. In doing so, Lorey makes a
dramatic departure from prevailing social science research on precarity,
which has its roots in the work of two prominent French sociologists,
Bourdieu and Castel. In their work, precarity is given an exclusively nega-
tive meaning, and a conceptual binary is constructed between the secure
welfare state, and insecure precarity. However, for Lorey this raises two
questions, namely who was already denied adequate protection by wel-
fare state provisions? And in what ways is social insecurity becoming
the norm? (p. 42). If precarity is always framed in contrast to a norm of
security, it becomes impossible to grasp the contemporary normalization
211
by which precarity becomes the disciplining norm.

Lorey proposes a conception of precarity with three key dimen-
sions. Firstly, it encompasses the understanding of existential precarity,
or precarious life, as elaborated by Judith Butler. In this aspect, precar-
ity highlights the vulnerability of a living being due to its dependency
on the work of others. Here, Lorey supersedes Butler by marking the
significance of reproductive work noting that precarious life is crucially
dependent on care and reproduction (p. 19). Domination turns this exis-
tential precariousness into an anxiety towards threatening others, who
must be preventively neutralized or destroyed in order to protect those
who believe themselves under threat.
The second dimension of precarity is concerned with the hierar-
chization of precariousness, and its differential distribution through re-
lations of inequality. This operates through processes of othering. From
the formation of the liberal-capitalist state, all those who did not meet
the norm of the normalized white propertied male subject, and all those
who posed a threat to this norm, were precarized (p. 37). That is, the
construction of the other forms a central component of precarity as
inequality. Liberal governmentality, even in its welfare-state version,
was always dependent on multiple forms of precarity the precarity
of women performing unpaid labor in the reproductive domain of the
private sphere; the precarity of all those excluded from the nation-state
compromise between capital and labor (as foreign, abnormal or poor),
and the precarity of peoples living under the extreme dispossession of
colonization. Lorey argues that these precarized others are constructed
as a threat against which the body politic must be protected. Legitimizing
the protection of some invariably white male citizens requires deep-
ening the precarity of those deemed other. By using precarity in this way,
as a structural category which orders hierarchical relations of violence
and inequality (p. 38), Lorey establishes a structural dimension which is
lacking in the Foucauldian notion of governmentality. Moreover, Lorey
argues that the production of precarity as relations of systemic inequality
is rooted in the bourgeois mode of governing from its inception. This
points to potential histories of feminized ruptures. The view that precar-
ity is not new but has a history, and an inherently gendered one since
women as reproductive laborers and women as colonial subjects were al-
212
Book Reviews
ways precarized suggests also a history of feminized resistances which

have repeatedly disturbed the governmental order, and from which we
might learn.
The third dimension of precarity Lorey explores is precarization as
governmentality: as mode of governing that instrumentalizes insecurity.
She strives to problematize the complex interrelation between an instru-
ment of governing, economic exploitation, and modes of subjectivation,
in the ambivalence between subjugation and empowerment. Here, she
puts Foucaults analysis of biopolitical governmentality to good work.
In Foucaults conception, biopolitics developed when life entered poli-
tics from the late eighteenth-century onwards, when governing began
to concern itself with the preservation of each individual to serve the
productivity of the state (p. 25). This follows the Foucauldian under-
standing that governing does not consist primarily in overt repression,
but in orchestrating an internalized self-regulation; the orchestration of
self-conduct.
Lorey argues that from the formation of capitalism to the pres-
ent, the wealth of the state depends on the health of its population.
Therefore, the policies of bourgeois-liberal government have concerned
themselves with producing and then securing normality, requiring that
every individual govern and normalize themselves. With the biopoliti-
cal demand to orient oneself to what is normal, everyone must adopt
a relation to themselves their own bodies and lives that is primarily
driven by self-regulation. For, it is precisely through the way they con-
duct themselves, how they govern themselves, that individuals become
amenable to social, political and economic steering and regulation (p.
35). From a governmental perspective, acts of self-empowerment are
rendered deeply ambivalent. Rather than being inherently emancipatory,
these practices of apparent self-empowerment can signify modes of
self-governing that represent a conformist self-determination that in fact
enables extraordinary governability. This latter point resonates strongly
with feminist critiques of the focus on individual-based empowerment
which permeates institutional policy-making on gender in the neoliberal
era (cf. Phillips, 2013).
Thus Lorey demonstrates that biopolitical self-conduct is not en-
tirely a neoliberal phenomenon, but rather reaches back to the origins of
213
the bourgeois state. Here again, Lorey marks a departure from Foucault,
for whom the entrepreneur of the self emerges only with neoliberal
governmentality. But in noting this continuity in bourgeois-liberal gov-
ernmentality, Lorey is adamant that self-conduct is never total or uni-
vocal. The active participation of each individual in the reproduction
of governing techniques never serves only subordination (p. 35). In the
ambivalence between subjugation and empowerment, self-government
does not necessarily always comply with the dominant discipline, but can
enable immanent struggles to take form.
In Chapter 4, Lorey outlines what is new in the neoliberal era: the
use of precarization as an instrument of governing. In neoliberalism,
while the precarity of the marginalized retains its threatening potential,
precarization is transformed into a normalized political-economic in-
strument. Consequently, the traditional boundaries between the social
positionings of the normal and the precarized are dissolving. The imag-
inary centre of the normal (p. 68) is not simply threatened, it becomes
itself increasingly insecure and threatening, lashing out with panic-like
reactions such as securing borders a loaded term which encapsulates
the logic of protection for some, at the expense of violence for countless
others. Everyone is precaritized, sooner or later. But this plays out in un-
even and disproportionately brutal ways for those who find themselves
at the wrong end of a gendered, racialized class hierarchy.
Insecuritization as policy produces insecurity as the core preoccu-
pation of the subject. In the guise of active self-design (p. 70), gov-
ernmentality calls forth a repressive subjectification that sees self-worth
measured on the miserly scale of capacity to seamlessly adjust to waves
of ever-escalating demands for speeding-up and flexibilization. In the
name of self-optimization, the risks and cares of precarization are
privatized. Any subject who is not able to carry the considerable risks of
precarity in perpetuity is automatically blamed and labeled dysfunctional,
irredeemably so.
Resistances: Precarity as Possibility

The most invigorating sections of the book are those which delve into
questions of resistances, and explore the inventive praxis of key initia-
214
Book Reviews
tives. By now, it is self-evident that the fissures of precarity necessitate

a paradigm shift in understandings of what emancipatory practice looks
like. For Lorey, this can start from recognising existential vulnerability
as an affirmative basis for politics (p. 91). Following Judith Butler, pre-
carity in its myriad forms is the starting point for alliances against a logic
of security for some at the expense of untold misery for many. Thus,
to address the question posed above at the outset, what would it mean
to take critical distance from those ubiquitous forms of fearfulness
would involve generating a critical intimacy (see Motta, 2014 for further
details) with others who are located in related but different predicaments
of precarity. Here, Lorey builds on a theoretical trajectory foreshadowed
in the introduction one which begins from connectedness with others,
without assuming that social relationality is equally accessible to all. She
frames this relationality as an entry point into practices of becoming-
common, a process of uncovering common interests within the differ-
entness of the precarious, with a view to co-creation of new forms of
organizing that rupture existing forms of governing in a refusal of obe-
dience (p. 15).
In chapter 6, Care Crisis and Care Strike, Lorey foregrounds the pi-
oneering praxis of Precarias a la Deriva who articulate and embody a
feminist counter-point to precarization. The Precarias focus on prevail-
ing logics of security in order to thoroughly break through them. Lorey
offers a lively and perceptive overview of their praxis, a kind of militant
research that echoes traditions of co-research emanating from the Ital-
ian workers movement of the 70s, and feminist consciousness-raising
groups. The Precarias begin from their own experiences of precarity, and
explore these together with others in interviews in movement, carried
out during a series of derives or free-form collective walks through
the city (p. 92). They note a multi-dimensional care crisis which is in-
separable from precarization. Against the logic of security, the Precarias
counterpose the notion of care community, inspired by a logic of care
(p. 95). The focus of their socio-political strategy is enhancing the status
of care, not as a feminine duty but the right to give and receive care in
dignity. Lorey discusses the Precarias call for a care strike in which care
work is not suspended, but rather shifted to the centre of life, thereby
interrupting business as usual. The care strike challenges the social
215
relations that render care as feminine, unproductive, and private. These

social relations are striked by producing excesses that flee from the
interests of profit. This flight is already underway in everyday life, but
needs to be articulated and interlinked (p. 97).
In the final chapter, Exodus and Constituting, Lorey works with Vir-
nos notion of exodus to emphasize that within the ambivalence of self-
governmentality lurks the potential for disobedience. Such an exodus
does not lead outside of power, but would be an exodus within power
relations themselves, that rejects neoliberal self-conduct and tries out
new modes of disobedience (p. 102). This could bring to life a model
of self-conduct as autonomy by and for precarious subjects, or what
could be a dynamic of becoming ungovernable. Lorey highlights the
practices of the EuroMayday network as embodying such a movement
of exodus, a space of constituting new collective subjectivities that af-
firm precarious as self-designation. Its resistive practices concentrate
on what the precarious have in common in all their differentness, to
avoid newly separating the manifold precarious. Alliances arose in the
network between cultural producers, migrant organizations, initiatives
of the unemployed, collectives of illegalized persons, and labor unions.
In both the Precarias and the EuroMayDay, Lorey notes an emphasis
on generating common notions in Spinozas sense of notions arising
from our existence as living beings, in order to discern what is commonly
shared. So too, both initiatives utilize alternative practices of knowledge
production like militant research, to map everyday life uneasiness and
insubordinations (Malo de Molina, cited on p. 111). Loreys account is
rich material for anyone looking to develop an engaged research praxis
along similar lines.
One limitation in Loreys argument concerns the way in which gov-
ernmentality deploys othering as a means to precaritize those who are
not the protected male citizen. Here she names women performing re-
productive labor, and peoples living under colonialism. While there are
indeed strong parallels here, Lorey conflates an important distinction.
This is, in brief, that the subjecthood (however partial) accorded even to
proletarian women in imperialist countries was premised on the total de-
nial of subjecthood to colonized peoples. Afro Pessimist theory argues
that the colonial other is defined as a non-subject (cf. Moten, 2013), and
216
Book Reviews
so must first claim subjecthood, which is already available to women of

colonizer countries. It would have been preferable to see more nuance
on this point.
Nonetheless, this book offers a very incisive framework for under-
standing how we are placed within regimes of neoliberal governmental-
ity, in a manner that somehow appears voluntary, and how we might
begin to conduct ourselves otherwise. Loreys work deftly synthesizes
previously disparate ideas, particularly the linking of othering, repro-
ductive labor, and precarity. Her exploration of the possible uses of
insecurity, via close engagement with movement praxis, is a refreshing
contrast to prevailing discourse on the topic. While governmental pre-
carization is designed to make individuals governable through insecurity,
a one-sided focus on danger and threat elides the potentiality of resistive
reversal or flight. In the small insubordinations of precarious everyday
life, the disciplining self-conduct is subverted time and again. Through
these resistances, the precarious have the potential to refuse to be divided
and dispersed, and thereby transform contingency from a threat into a
space of radical openness.
References
Moten, Fred (2013) Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the
Flesh). South Atlantic Quarterly, 112(4): 737780.
Motta, Sara C. (2014) Latin America: Reinventing Revolutions, an
Other Politics in Practice and Theory. In R. Stahler-Sholk, H. E.
Vanden and M. Becker (eds.) Rethinking Latin American Social Movements:
Radical Action from Below. New York and London: Rowman and Littlefield.
Phillips, Ruth (2013) How Empowerment May Miss Its Mark: Gender
Equality Policies and How They are Understood in Womens NGOs.
Voluntas, 26(4): 11221142.
Annette Maguire, University of Newcastle, Australia
217
Engler, Mark and Paul, This is an Uprising: How

Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the Twenty-First Century
New York: Nation Books, 2016
ISBN 978-1-56858-733-2
A lot has been written about strategic nonviolent action since Gene Sharp
published his seminal book on The politics of Nonviolent Action in
1972. Paul and Mark Englers book more or less sums it up. However,
the oeuvre is more than an introduction into the world of strategic non-
violence. It is a primer into the ideas of peaceful mobilization for social
change and an exploration of the American history of popular protest
and uprising. In short: it is a book for people trying to understand social
change, and those trying to create it.
Mark and Paul Engler are no unknowns. Mark is an editorial board
member of Dissent, one of Americas leading intellectual journals on
political ideas, and the author of How to rule the world, a book on the
crisis of neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, and the hope that both will
be overcome by a more democratic globalization. Paul is the found-
ing Director of the Center for the Working Poor and has more than ten
years of experiences in the global justice and labor movement. Both to-
gether publish short articles on democracyuprising.com, which focuses
on specific aspects or episodes of the book.
This in an uprising takes Gene Sharp and his personal journey
from pacifism towards Strategic Nonviolent Action as a starting point
and skillfully mixes Sharps personal episodes and anecdotes with the
development of his ideas. This biographical approach to explain the de-
velopment of thoughts and theories is used throughout the whole book,
making it easy to read and providing the reader with interesting informa-
tion on key figures of social movements in America on the fly.
The authors also refer to Martin Luther Kings civil rights move-
ments and Gandhis defiance campaign as classic historical examples
of nonviolent action. However, their strong focus on Sharp and his con-
218
Book Reviews
ceptualization of power and understanding of nonviolence as strategic,

rather than principled, action also represents a shortcoming of the book
as it leaves other concepts widely unattended.
In the second chapter, Engler and Engler address a basic prob-
lem everyone engaged in social change must face: whether to follow a
movement-based or structure-oriented approach. The ideas of the first
tradition are exemplified by Fox Piven and Richard Clowards theories
on social movements and are contrasted with Saul D. Alinskys approach
of structure-oriented community organizing. The authors eventually
conclude that the marriage between both approaches represents a major
breakthrough.
As an example for such a hybrid between a momentum-driven
movement and structure-based organization, the authors present the ex-
ample of Otpors resistance against Milosevic in Serbia. Protests against
Milosevic started in 1996, but reached a dead end in late 1997 and left
many activists feeling discouraged and depressed. Many faded out of
the activities as a result. In order to overcome the problem of volatility
of the protests, Otpor was founded and introduced some aspects of
community organizing. To form a sustainable movement, the activists
decided to rely on small groups (mostly built up by friends) to provide
these activists with special training, to build local capacity for action, and
to unite these groups loosely under the banner of Otpor and the com-
mon goal to bring down Milosevic. This hybrid strategy slowed Otpors
achievement of its goals, but sustained the movement over the next three
years. In the end, however, the movement was not able to survive after
the ultimate goal was reached. Otpor proved itself incapable of influ-
encing post-transition politics as a party, and did not spawn watchdog
organizations outside the parliament.
After providing this example of nonviolent action that had rather
mixed results, Engler and Engler address in the following chapters criti-
cal points for the success of a movement. First, drawing on Sharps theo-
ry of power, they emphasize the importance of the movements capacity
to direct its power against the pillars of support of the given regime
and to split the forces of the opponent. Further, pointing at the example
of the Occupy Wall Street movement, they highlight the importance
of disruption as a critical element of successful nonviolent action. While
219
conventional protests like the One Nation Working together protest

march on Washington drew more than 175 000 protestors in October
2010, it did not create the same momentum as Occupy, which dis-
rupted everyday life to a greater extent. In the same sense, Engler and
Engler discuss the ACT UP movement which polarized the country by
criticizing the governments reaction to the spread of AIDS during the
late 1980s. As a so-called divider movement it proved to be success-
ful since it mobilized former neutral bystanders by polarizing the politi-
cal landscape. Finally, the authors focus on the aspect of discipline and
consequent nonviolent strategies by referring to the history of Earth
first!, a militant group which became famous for tree spiking. When this
strategy backfired, Earth First! adopted a strategy of consequent non-
violence and upheld this strategy even after key activists were attacked.
This resilience eventually triggered mass mobilization and guaranteed
the groups success.
The authors provide a rich variety of both historical and contem-
porary examples of nonviolent resistance and campaigns throughout the
book. However, the piece focuses very much on the history of Ameri-
can social movements with only a few excursions to other central move-
ments in the history of nonviolent resistance, like Ghandis Salt March
and defiance campaign or Otpors struggle to overthrow Milosevic.
In the end, Mark and Paul Englers contribution is an attempt to
overcome the dilemma of effective mass mobilization and sustainable
change by combining the existing theoretical approaches on nonviolent
action. According to the authors, mass mobilization alter[s] the term
of political debate and create[s] new possibilities for progress; structure-
based organizing helps take advantage of this potential and protects
against efforts to roll back advances; and countercultural communities
preserve progressive values, nurturing dissidents who go to initiate the
next waves of revolt (Engler and Engler 2016, p. 253). In other words,
they propose a division of labor to transition successful social mobiliza-
tion into sustainable social change.
However, while this book and its approach of combining different
strategies is innovative, it has shortcomings as well. The book is gener-
ally biased towards the positive role civil society plays in the formation
of movements and grassroots community organizations. This might be
220
Book Reviews
rooted in the fact that the authors have been engaged in the business of
organizing and protest for decades. However, civil society does not nec-
essarily advance in a progressive direction. If we think of the civil rights
campaign in the US, we also have to consider the Ku Klux Klan and
several other extremist uncivil movements. This relevant debate on the
uncivil civil society, however, remains unmentioned.
Furthermore, the authors themselves admit that several ques-
tions remain open, namely structural problems and potential conflicts
of interest between activists following the different approaches of mo-
mentum-driven campaigns, and structure-oriented organizing as well as
the coordination problem. How, for example, should the proposed di-
vision of labor between momentum-driven campaigns like Occupy
and structure-oriented organizations like classical unions be organized?
Should they be organized by a common committee in advance or is it the
spontaneous outcome of the protest itself ? What if there is no organiza-
tion taking up the effort to secure the achievements of a social move-
ment? How is going to do the job? It would have advanced the field of
resistance studies if the authors had considered such questions.
Nonetheless, the book is one of my 2016-favourites on the topic. It
has great value as an introduction and an informed overview, which pre-
destines it as course book on social movements and nonviolent action.
Markus Bayer, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
221
Books Received
Books listed here does not preclude later review.
Mahatma Gandhis life in colour. (2016). Mumbai, GandhiServe India.
Dubensky, J. S. and Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding.
(2016). Peacemakers in action : profiles in religious peacebuilding.
Cambridge ; New York, Cambridge University Press.
Eaton, H. (2016). Advancing nonviolence and social transformation :
new perspectives on nonviolent theories. Bristol, CT, Equinox Pub. Ltd.
Elder, P. (2016). Military Recruiting in the United States. St. Marys City.
Gleditsch, N. P. (2016). Mot en mer fredelig verden? Oslo, Pax.
Godwin, W. (2017). Romantic rationalist : a William Godwin reader.
Oakland, CA, PM Press.
Kriesberg, L. and B. W. Dayton (2017). Constructive conflicts : from
escalation to resolution. London, Rowman & Littlefield.
Lewis, R. and S. Mills (2003). Feminist postcolonial theory : a reader.
Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.
Lykkenborg, L. R. (2016). Motstandsbarn : med fars krigsinnsats i
bagasjen. Drbak, Quintano.
Morar, N., T. Nail and D. W. Smith Between Deleuze and Foucault.
Morar, N., T. Nail and D. W. Smith (2016). Between Deleuze and Foucault.
Nail, T. (2012). Returning to revolution : Deleuze, Guattari and
Zapatismo. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.
Sadiki, L. (2015). Routledge handbook of the Arab Spring : rethinking
democratization. London ; New York,, Routledge.
Skjoldager, M. (2016). Syv r for PET : Jakob Scharfs tid. Kbenhavn,
Peoples Press.
Synstnes, H. M. (2016). Den innerste sirkel, Den militre
sikkerhetstjenesten 1945-2002. Oslo, Dreyer Forlag.
222

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Journal of Resistance Studies

Cover illustration: Nandipha Mntambo Europa (2008)

Almeida, Deirdre A. Martin, Brian

A huge thanks to all the anonymous reviewers.

encounter, where a politics enfleshed that is be-ing gently and powerfully

womens role in many popular movements has intensified, with shifts in

Feminizing Resistance Studies

creative distillations that provide new trajectories for feminine resistance

rather than empowerment and conservation policies support indus-

The Gifts of Feminized Resistances

Storytelling as Onto-Epistemological Becomings

In contrast, as our contributors demonstrate, the storytelling of

Reading Motherhood Politically

taking care of a children a collective, community responsibility, not the

women to be more equal participants in the movement as a whole. On

Feminine Semiotics and Feminine Divine

As Walter Mignolo explains, in capitalist coloniality the word is

given over to ritual, repetition, a secondary attribution of values, specu-

Through the body of the performed puppet, deliberate attention is

itself as a sentient tool that simultaneously exposes the constructs of

Land as already always ontological-political has clear resonances

Liminality and Queering Borderlands

It instead seeks to co-create collective practices of meaning-making in

site of epistemic possibility. It seeks to disrupt the very binaries between

Strategies and Ways Forward: The Role and

Storytelling, Storytellers, and Critical Intimacies

and being-knowing, and discuss their ethical and political commitments

Arguably, the researcher(s) become(s) a storyteller(s), but such a

it is of no surprise that decolonizing epistemological practices comes

Within this space of queerness it becomes possible to question the ways in

the shifting nature of marginality whereby the marginal is often within,

Spaces and practices of epistemological listening involve creating

An Ethics of Care and Care-fullness

ence of being violently rendered abject and absent.

excavating from the denied.

something shared, already

wandering through shadows

I journey with you;

Storytellers re-rooted into life

We look Medusa in the face

In Newcastle, Australia and Rovaniemi, Finland

Seppl, Tiina (forthcoming) On Outsourcing the Political in Political

Telling Stories of Resistance and Ruination:

Make a difference, make a difference. (Naomi)

form of forced migration and an interrelated aspect of broader transna-

All contracting States who have ratified the Refugee Convention

The Hate Figure

person claiming asylum) could be either genuine or false. Indeed,

The Female Victim

man, 2008; Hajdukowski-Ahmed, 2009). Where there is an emerging

ognized (Kea and Roberts-Holmes, 2013). Required by the Home Office

Listening to Womens Stories

and Doucet (1998: 139) foreground, analysis is a crucial stage of the

Hearing Resistance and Ruination

criticized for misattribute[ing] womens stories with intentions where

of narrative frameworks that can constrain the stories of women seek-

Narratives of Women Seeking Asylum

1. The Narrative of Resistance

situations of oppression and conditions of exploitation. Suggesting they

he had experienced, was important: I had to fight hard against these

there should be more understanding about diversity and equal rights

my aim was to talk about child detention and I received a lot of

cannot do. Anne-Laure also talked about being a source of inspiration